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The Will in Ethics 



BY 



THEOPHILUS B. STORK 




BOSTON 

SHERMAN, FRENCH & COMPANY 

1915 



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Copyright, 1915 
Sherman, French &> Company 

JUL 23 1915 

©CI.A406903 



THE SHOP WINDOW WORD 

All clever merchants put into their shop windows 
a display of their goods, not merely by way of at- 
tracting, but also, and chiefly, by way of inform- 
ing possible customers what may be expected within. 

In like manner the showman puts forth his gaudy 
pictures that the passerby may get a glimpse of the 
glories that await the purchaser of a ticket. It 
were well and convenient if the author might also 
give some notion of the contents of his book to the 
possibly critical gentleman who picks it up and 
exclaims, perhaps with some impatience : " Well, 
what is it all about anyhow: what is the fellow 
driving at? Is there any meat in this uncracked 
walnut of a book? " His thought being: " Must 
I wade through all these pages before I can tell 
what the shopper and theatergoer get so easy a 
glimpse of before making their venture? " 

This very natural desire has in view the answer- 
ing of two perfectly legitimate questions, — first 
and generally: Is there anything within worth 
looking at under any circumstances by anybody? 
And secondly and particularly, — granting the 
first question answered satisfactorily: Is that 
worthy anything of any worth to me ? 



c/ 



ii THE SHOP WINDOW WORD 

It is for this reason the author essays this shop 
window word to briefly exhibit his wares and in a 
few sentences express the thought which he has 
attempted to elaborate more fully and at length 
in his book. 

The particular will and the Universal will and 
their mutual relations to each other is the most 
absorbing and important theme that the intellect 
of man can dwell upon. 

In it are hidden the mysteries of life, good and 
evil, happiness and misery. Once understand the 
true relations of the particular will to the Univer- 
sal, and you hold in your hand the key to all 
things. This is the theme of the book, in which 
we seek to discover first what the will is, how we 
may know the Universal will as distinguished from 
the particular will, and what the rule or canon 
of their relation to each other; for the Universal 
will is and must be right and good altogether, and 
whether a particular will be good must depend upon 
its relation to the Universal will, upon whether it 
observes the rule of their relation. A good will 
must be a will harmonious, at one, with the Univer- 
sal will; and this harmony of the particular will 
with the Universal will has two aspects, — one the 
internal side of feeling, the condition of the soul ; 
the other the external side of conduct, the expres- 
sion of that feeling in outward acts. On the in- 
ternal side of feeling, harmony of will with the Uni- 
versal will spells happiness for the particular will, 
the highest and only true happiness it is capable 



THE SHOP WINDOW WORD iii 

of: on the external side of conduct, it spells right 
conduct, virtue and righteousness. The two are 
inseparable ; a happy — that is, harmonious — 
will on the internal side must be a good will on the 
external side. Happiness and goodness are identi- 
cal ; they are but different aspects of the particular 
will harmonious with the Universal will. " Be 
good and you will be happy," is, therefore, no 
truer a maxim than the reverse : " Be happy and 
you will be good " ; for true happiness, which is a 
harmonious internal will, must produce a har- 
monious external will, — that is, a will good in its 
conduct. 

What, then, is meant by a harmonious will; 
and in what does the harmony of will with will con- 
sist? Plainly it must consist in the agreement of 
the tastes, ideas, traits, purposes which make up the 
content of the one will, — which are the will, in 
fact — with the tastes, ideas, traits, purposes 
which make up the content of the other will. 

Briefly summarizing the conclusions on these 
various points, we endeavor to show first that the 
will is not, what for convenience in practical ethics 
we are so prone to consider it, a faculty hyposta- 
tized as a judge which upon every occasion chooses 
and decides this or that particular course of con- 
duct. This is too narrow a view, and leads to those 
problems of Determinism and Free Will which are 
so unprofitable and, as will presently appear, so 
unnecessary. 

The particular will, man's will, is the man, his 



iv THE SHOP WINDOW WORD 

whole intellectual and emotional capacity, made up 
of his tastes, his appetites, passions, knowledge, 
habits, his relations with all that surrounds him. 
In other words, the will is the man ; and not the man 
separated, isolated from all about him, but the man 
as part of the whole, with a place and relation to 
the Universe. The particular will is part of the 
Universal will, not to be understood or treated as 
separate, but only as part of the Universal. The 
Universal will manifests itself through the many 
particular wills that go to make it up. How this 
can be, how the Universal will and the many par- 
ticular wills interpenetrate each other, and yet each 
preserves its own identity, neither lost in the other, 
but each particular will receiving its true signifi- 
cance from the Universal and being itself only as it 
is part of the Universal, so that the more intensely 
and truly it becomes part of the Universal, the 
more intensely and truly it is itself ; this is not easy 
to understand on its intellectual side and viewed 
by reason, for reason cannot deal with reality in 
all its truth. Feeling, however, our own feeling, — 
which is reality, — gives us a glimpse of this pro- 
found and wondrous truth that the identity of the 
particular is bound up with its relations to the 
Universal will; as it recognizes this relationship, 
it gains a power and a joy impossible to it separate 
and isolated, opposed to the Universal. For in 
feeling, which is my reality, I never realize my en- 
tire self, my identity as a particular will on the 
emotional side, except as I participate in the great 



THE SHOP WINDOW WORD v 

Universal feelings ; so alone do I become truly my- 
self. Hints and glimpses of this we have a-plenty 
if we will but know them. Who has not felt the 
intensifying effect on his particular will of sharing 
with some vast multitude some common feeling that 
carried all away as by a single impulse, every heart 
beating as one, every lip voicing one thought! 
This is an experience we all have had in greater or 
less degree, and to it we can confidently appeal in 
proof of the profound truth that in the Universal 
will, as part of it, the particular will finds its own 
identity emphasized and intensified a thousandfold. 
It may have been only the wild enthusiasm of col- 
lege boys over a baseball or football game; it may 
have been a vast convention fused into a single 
feeling by a great orator; whatever the occasion, 
there is no denying the real and intense joy which 
the particular will gains by this becoming part of a 
greater, more Universal will. 

In still fainter degree we know the happiness of 
the communion of friend with friend, — the inter- 
change and sharing of feelings, tastes, ideas, the 
harmony of particular will with particular will, 
which we call friendship ; the intense and higher 
harmony we call love. For this is the beginning 
of the higher harmony of particular will with the 
Universal will, since it is only by harmony with 
each particular will — our friend, our lover, our 
neighbor — that we can attain the greater har- 
mony. We only know the Universal by and 
through those particulars that help constitute it. 



vi THE SHOP WINDOW WORD 

How essential to all true happiness is this har- 
mony of will with will, and so with the Universal 
will, may be seen in two remarkable ways. First, 
it is quite evident that the very moment a particular 
will harbors feelings, ideas, not in harmony with 
part of the Universal will, it falls into unhappi- 
ness. All dividing feelings — envy, jealousy, 
hatred — make men miserable because they tend to 
destroy those relations which bind each particular 
into the whole. They negative the true relation 
of the particular and the Universal to each other, — 
namely, union and harmony, — and substitute divi- 
sion and conflict, and so separate that which is one 
into many parts. And secondly, on the other 
hand, feelings of harmony such as love, sympathy 
with others, make men happy in feeling and good in 
conduct, for they unite all particular wills to each 
other and so to the Universal will. Homely ex- 
amples of this are not wanting: Let me dislike, 
envy, or hate a man, and every success of that man, 
every piece of good fortune he receives, stabs me 
like a dagger; I am miserable because of my in- 
harmonious will. But suppose I have the reverse 
of all these feelings toward him; I think his 
thoughts, feel his emotions, sympathize with him, 
love him ; his success is then mine ; I rejoice as much 
as he does ; his joy and pride flow over and fill my 
soul too, for we are now united in feeling, no longer 
separate ; we are one in our common feelings, and 
through him one with that Universal will of which 
he is but part, it is true, but the part which, since 



THE SHOP WINDOW WORD vii 

it is next to and in close contact with me, represents 
the Universal for me there and now. Thus the 
parent unselfishly shares and really has the success 
achieved by his child; their harmony of will with 
will obliterates all distinction of the two ; they each 
enjoy the triumph of the other; there is no thought 
of jealousy or envy; perfect sympathy and love 
drive out all dividing feeling. This gives us a 
foreshadowing in petto of that greater, completer 
harmony of the particular will with the Universal 
will which will be the heaven of the next world, for 
it will be the perfect recognition by the particular 
will of its relations to the Universal will, and a 
harmony with it of which the examples cited are but 
faint adumbra. 

Thus by our feelings are we made to know the 
great truth that the particular will must find its 
happiness in the harmony of the particular will with 
the Universal will of which the instances just cited 
are imperfect, partial examples. And, further, we 
learn that the particular will can never be itself, 
realize its own identity fully, as a separate, inde- 
pendent will, isolated from or opposed to the Uni- 
versal will, but only as part of it, bound up with 
it, partaking of its content, contributing to that 
content, making a part of the Universal will. 

And this enables us to understand the freedom 
of the will ; how the particular will may be itself, 
retain its own identity, while being a part of the 
Universal will. To deny freedom to the particular 
will except as it is independent of the Universal 



viii THE SHOP WINDOW WORD 

will, separate and apart from it, is to ignore the 
nature of the relation between the two. The par- 
ticular will is not part of the Universal will by 
merely physical juxtaposition with other parts and 
with the whole; the part is in the whole and the 
whole in it; they interpenetrate; the whole would 
not be itself without the part, nor would the part 
be itself save in the whole, and bound up in the 
whole. This is hard to understand as an abstrac- 
tion, but is expressed for our intelligence in the 
anthropomorphic language of the Scriptures: 
" He " (that is, the Universal will conceived thus) 
. . . dwelleth in me " (the particular) " and I in 
Him." * My acts, therefore, are free, although 
influenced by motive, by environment, by heredity, 
for all these are my relations with the Universal 
will, and so are part of my identity as a particular 
will. A motive only influences me by becoming 
part of myself, because it finds in me that which re- 
sponds to it ; and so of other influences of my sur- 
roundings, — they only affect me as they become 
or are part of myself. My ancestors, too, are 
myself. My choice or decision of to-day may have 
been made centuries ago, and I may express in some 
act of to-day what a cave-dwelling ancestor of the 
stone age, or armor-clad crusader, or a burgher of 
the Middle Ages, thought, felt, and was. Thus is 
to be understood the unity of the particular will 
with the Universal. I myself am part of the Uni- 
versal, the whole. My relation to the whole con- 
*St. John VI:56; aso I John 111:24; IV: 15, 16. 



THE SHOP WINDOW WORD ix 

stitutes me, what I am; it is a part of my own 
identity, of my own particularity, to be part of the 
whole; and all and every one of these relations go 
to constitute my identity. I am not the less, but 
the greater, by reason of these relations. 

It remains to discover what the canon or rule 
of the relations of the particular will to the Univer- 
sal will must be on the external side of conduct. In 
other words, what is right conduct of the particular 
will with regard to the Universal will. And as 
preliminary to this it becomes necessary to inquire 
how we may know the Universal will as distin- 
guished from the particular. 

Our only knowledge of the Universal will must be 
through the particular wills which, as we have al- 
ready had occasion to remark, are part of it and 
go to make it up. It may well be asked how, 
among a variety and diversity of particular wills, 
any notion of the Universal will can be gotten. 
Two criterions, however, we have which enable us to 
recognize the Universal will when it appears: 
First, is its universality, its presence in all particu- 
lars ; second, its necessity, the compulsory charac- 
ter of all its manifestations. When, for example, 
we find — as we do — certain traits, desires, char- 
acteristic qualities, that are common to all particu- 
lars, we may be sure that these are parts of the 
Universal will expressed in them. What the ma- 
jority of sane, average, normal men think, feel, and 
are, we may be sure expresses the Universal will in 
them. " Vox populi, vox Dei " serves as a rough 



x THE SHOP WINDOW WORD 

expression of this principle; that is to say, the 
average sense of the majority of men is an expres- 
sion of God's will, that is the Universal will. 

And when, likewise, we are aware of a trait or 
characteristic which exercises compulsion over us, 
which we cannot escape or change or modify, but 
must yield obedience to it, we recognize such as 
part of the Universal will. Independent of our 
own particular will, we have to regard it as part of 
the Universal will, and so we come to regard com- 
pulsions of our appetites, our hunger and thirst, 
the compulsions of our thinking, the conceptions, 
causality, identity, etc., as manifestations in our 
particular will of the Universal will. 

Having thus ascertained what the Universal and 
particular wills are, we may now proceed to the 
rule or canon which governs their external rela- 
tions ; or, in other words, to ascertain how the 
particular will is to act in its conduct with regard 
to the Universal. On the internal side we have seen 
that it must be harmonious, and the question now 
arises : How, in its conduct, is the harmony of the 
Universal will and the particular will to be pre- 
served ? 

It has been shown that the Universal will is made 
up of the particular wills ; they are part of it just 
as it is part of them, and the harmony of the two 
must be an agreement of all, the content of each 
particular will with the content of the Universal 
will, that content being all the traits, desires, feel- 
ings, and so on, which make up the will. From the 



THE SHOP WINDOW WORD xi 

foregoing, therefore, it is easy to draw the canon 
of their mutual relations, since the particular will 
has within it elements of the Universal will. And 
since its content helps to make up the content of 
the Universal will, it follows that to the maintain- 
ing true harmony of will the content of the particu- 
lar will is to be retained and to be as rich and varied 
as possible, for so only will it be possible to have a 
rich and varied harmony with the Universal will; 
and not a single item of its content is to be elim- 
inated save where it conflicts with the Universal 
will, for to strike out any part of that content is to 
strike out part of the Universal will of which the 
particular will is a part. The particularity of 
the particular will is, therefore, to be retained ex- 
cept where it conflicts with the Universal. This 
rule has important practical consequences which 
may be alluded to: First, it means that all the 
content of the particular will, its desires, its feel- 
ings, are right and good except where plainly they 
conflict with the Universal will. Sin only occurs 
where this occurs, and the good will is the will of 
the particular so ruled that all its contents are re- 
tained as far as possible without coming into con- 
flict with the Universal will. Applying this canon, 
we are able to observe that the ascetic as well as the 
voluptuary are wrong: the ascetic in repressing 
those natural desires which go to constitute the 
contents of the particular will and so of the Uni- 
versal, for the ascetic, in thus repressing them, re- 
presses the Universal will itself. 



xii THE SHOP WINDOW WORD 

Finally it is to be observed that a good will thus 
defined as a will harmonious with the Universal will 
is the only good in and of itself without qualifica- 
tion or dependence on any other thing for its good- 
ness. Likewise it is the happy will; put into an- 
thropomorphic terms, it may be said to be the com- 
munity of man's feelings and will with God's feel- 
ings and will, so far as man is capable thereof. 
Such capacity varies with each man : to each man, 
according to his capacity, is the gift of communion 
with God to come. 

Of the gradual substitution of the Universal will 
for the particular, the gradual assimilation of the 
Universal by the particular will so that the particu- 
lar will grows nearer and nearer to identity with the 
Universal will, only faint allusion can here be made. 
This does not mean an emptying of the particular 
will of its content, but a filling it full with the con- 
tent of the Universal will; and so we come to the 
apotheosis of the particular will, and so are given 
to understand the splendid declaration of Hebrew 
inspiration : " He that loseth his life for my sake, 
shall find it." * He loses his particular will by 
assimilating the Universal will. His particular de- 
sires, feelings, are given up to receive back the Uni- 
versal desires, feelings — a richer and fuller gift 
than all he has surrendered. 

*St. Matthew X: 39. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Good Will 1 

The Will 1 

The Particular and Universal Will ... 33 

The Good Will 43 

Knowledge of the Universal Will . .45 

Happiness 78 

Sin and Death 88 

The Identity of Goodness and Happiness . 89 
The Reconciliation of Wills: i.e., the Strug- 
gle for Happiness ....... 98 

Art 108 

Religion 119 

Education of the Will 143 

Complicated Nature of Right and Wrong . 147 
Symbols, Ceremonies, the Concrete Picture 

or Conception 152 

Conclusion 160 

Reconciliation of the Particular and the 

Universal Will 175 



THE GOOD WILL 

Kant has declared that the only good in the 
world that was good without any qualification was 
a good will.* 

What a good will is, and what the will itself, 
thus becomes an important, perhaps the most im- 
portant, question in Ethics. 

Let us examine, then, first, what the will is, and, 
second, what a good will is in the light of this 
declaration. 



THE WILL 

The difficulty and confusion in our thinking of 
the will arise chiefly from two entirely independent 
sources ; one practical, the other speculative and 
philosophical. 

The necessities of practical ethics, the science of 
law and of government, the theory of rewards and 
punishments by society with respect to its mem- 
bers, require us to regard the will in one very 
especial and particular way. We have to consider 

* " It is not possible to think of anything anywhere in the 
world or even outside it that can be regarded as good with- 
out any limitation, except only a good will." Quoted by 
Paulsen in his " Immanuel Kant" (1902), p. 338. 

1 



2 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

it as an especial, highly differentiated function of 
the mind which chooses, decides, weighs conse- 
quences, debates conduct, has to be urged by 
promises of reward to certain courses of action, 
to be deterred from others by threats of punish- 
ment. Thus we have come to hypostatize it, to 
appeal to it as if it were a person, with arguments, 
inducements, to act in one way rather than another. 

Pursuing still further this practical path, we 
feel under the necessity of justifying the penalties 
and rewards we bestow by positing the will as free 
to choose any course of conduct it pleases and, 
therefore, as responsible and deserving the respec- 
tive rewards bestowed or penalties inflicted. It is 
true that we then find ourselves confronted with the 
difficulty of reconciling the freedom of the will 
which we require, with the government by motive 
which we also must use in these dealings with the 
will by law and government. If the will responds 
to motives which form the springs of all its acts, 
if they are the cause and the act of will but the 
result, how can we call a will free that simply re- 
sponds to motive ; or if it be free, nevertheless, then 
what becomes of our government by law which seeks 
to coerce the will by presenting motives in the form 
of penalties that will compel the will to choose one 
course of conduct rather than another? 

The truth is that in reality the will is not 
affected in this way at all. How many men, when 
tempted to commit crime, deliberately choose to 
refrain after weighing in their minds the penalty 



THE WILL 3 

prescribed in comparison with the gratification 
anticipated from the prohibited act? I venture to 
assert not one : the effect of law upon the will is of 
an entirely different sort. The law forbidding an 
act and laying down penalties educates the will, 
forms a new will in the man to that extent by 
coupling with the acts forbidden the acting idea 
or notion that such acts must not be done, this 
being emphasized by the penalty annexed thereto. 
Thus when the idea of these acts arises in the con- 
sciousness suggesting the putting them into execu- 
tion, there comes with them that prohibiting idea 
that they must not be done, and so the will is edu- 
cated by law; and the average man thus trained 
by law or even without express law, educated by 
habit, custom, the general sentiment of his fellow- 
men, never debates or deliberates at all; his will, 
without choosing, takes the course of conduct 
marked out for him by its education, its fixed con- 
stitution. Thus a good man does not hesitate or 
deliberate when the occasion for a dishonest act 
presents itself : he refuses at once, inevitably, auto- 
matically. It is his character, his education of his 
will, that instantly decides his act. To say, there- 
fore, of such a man of fixed character, that his acts 
can be positively prognosticated in advance, is no 
reflection on the freedom or the strength of his 
will. On the contrary, it is only possible of weak 
minds, persons of no character either morally or 
mentally, vacillating imbeciles, that we say in 
popular language, " Oh, you can never tell what 



4 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

he will do." By which we signify not freedom of 
the will, but rather that he is lacking character, 
without decided will. Enough of this here and 
now. When we come to the education of the will 
it will be in place to labor this point more at length. 

Notwithstanding, however, the theoretical diffi- 
culties just pointed out, this treatment of the will 
answers very well for all the purposes of daily life ; 
rewards and punishments play their part, if not 
exactly as we theoretically imagine, yet effectually. 

The second or speculative source of our confu- 
sion in thinking the will, has to do with our 
methods of thinking, what might be called the laws 
of our thinking. It is to M. Bergson that credit 
is due for pointing out in a most distinguished 
way the weakness of the intellect for speculative 
work. It was his thesis that the human mind or 
intellect was only formed by evolution for the prac- 
tical dealing with matter, and beyond that had no 
capacity. A fairer statement of the intellect's 
capacity or incapacity would have been that the 
intellect has a double duty to perform: it has the 
practical dealing with matter, the managing of our 
daily life in its various details ; and it has the very 
different duty of speculative inquiry into the real- 
ity that lies back of these appearances, these phe- 
nomena. Its first service compels methods which 
are only suited for these practical matters. To 
deal with matter effectively it has to treat every- 
thing as lifeless and unchanging — the very con- 
trary of the reality as we well know; it treats 



THE WILL 5 

everything as separate, independent of every other ; 
it sets one thing over against another in its en- 
deavor to think them so that it may deal practi- 
cally with them. Its process is largely one of de- 
liberate abstraction, of omission of much that in 
reality belongs to them. We see exaggerated ex- 
amples of this in the treatment of the astronomers 
who deal with the heavenly bodies, and who, to 
facilitate their calculations, drop out all idea of 
any medium in which they move, assuming for their 
purpose that they swim in a vacuum ; or the 
physicists who, in reasoning of forces, ignore the 
attraction of gravitation, assuming for the occa- 
sion that it does not exist ; and so on.' 

In regard to the will, the error or confusion of 
thinking is more subtle ; it concerns itself with the 
notion of causality, one of the essential elements 
of any method that would deal practically with 
matter. To get results in the world of matter, to 
think our ships, our houses, our machinery, we 
must think in this one particular way; namely, 
that no object acts by its own initiative; every 
object is dead; life, and the life impulse, as M. 
Bergson styles it, has no place ; and to produce an 
effect on one object we must always have some 
other object with which to work that effect. Each 
object must also be considered as utterly cut off, 
separate, independent, of every other. Cause and 
effect themselves, the notion by which we work, are 
separate, cut off, external, to each other. It is a 
mechanical truth for mechanics only. It is from 



6 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

the translation of this method into the philosophi- 
cal world that our difficulty with the will arises. 
We apply the carpenter's rule of mechanics to the 
will; we treat the will as if it too were a bit of 
mechanical contrivance, moved by cause, made an 
effect, just as we treat the matter we work on for 
practical purposes of building ships, constructing 
houses, running machinery. But reality is not so 
constituted: in it objects are not all cut off, sepa- 
rate, but are all closely bound together, interpene- 
trate each other, so that often you cannot say 
where one thing ends and another begins ; cause 
reaches forward into effect, effect lies latent in the 
bosom of cause. This world of reality is not me- 
chanical; it is alive, full of self-initiative; even the 
most apparently fixed objects move — their mole- 
cules within, they themselves from without. The 
universe is a world made up of vitally connected 
parts ; every part is part of the whole, and the 
whole is in every part; they cannot be separated, 
for they are inevitably and vitally one. To put 
one part over against another, to regard them as 
external to each other, is to misconstrue the whole 
conception of reality, and to leave it with no more 
vital connection than the mechanical ones we use or 
fabricate in the course of our practical dealing with 
it. If, however, taking this mechanical view of the 
world, we contemplate ourselves in connection with 
those other objects, what hinders us from thinking 
of ourselves in the same way, each of us in a sepa- 
rate, perfectly inanimate condition, like a block or 



THE WILL 7 

a stone, incapable of acting save when something 
impels us from without? We may recognize that 
we have what the block or stone lacks, — to wit, 
life ; i. e., we can act without being acted upon ; yet 
we only half grasp this conception of life, for the 
next moment we say we cannot conceive even the 
living thing acting except under the goad of a 
motive. Of a will that acts without motive or 
initiates an act of itself, we really form no sufficient 
idea. If we force ourselves for a moment to regard 
the will acting by its own initiative, we apparently 
abandon our old method but for a moment, to fly 
back to it again when we have to think it as but the 
result of previous forces that have caused it, made 
it what it is ; and so take away all that we have 
given. Thus man and his will are left as simply 
the resultant of previously existing matter, a mere 
mechanically produced thing with no more freedom 
or independent existence than a block of granite. 
Let us forget, if you please, for a moment, the 
conventional view of the will to which we are all 
accustomed; the view which concentrates itself on 
the mere act of willing ; the manner of choosing and 
deciding, as if this was the all-important feature ; 
that treats this to all intents and purposes as if it 
were alone and all the will. While this fits in quite 
well with the scheme of practical ethics, whose main 
concern is with outward acts and their effect on 
society, on the relation of each man with his fellow, 
it fails very noticeably when we deal with theoreti- 
cal ethics. While not denying to those acts the 



8 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

title of manifestations of the will, we must be care- 
ful not to allow them to become substituted for the 
will itself, which is much more than these acts. 
These acts of willing, critically examined, will 
show in reality a very different state of affairs 
from the metaphorical representations by which we 
are so fond of symbolizing them. 

Let any one examine his own psychological ex- 
perience; recall some act of will that by its im- 
portance impressed its processes on his memory. 
I venture to say that he will find very little of that 
deciding, that choosing of one thing, one path, 
rather than another. Whatever seeming delibera- 
tion he finds will turn out to be rather an intellec- 
tual effort to see, a prolonged process of percep- 
tion of the situation or the circumstances presented 
to him; and that hesitation, or appearance of de- 
liberating, weighing consequences, choosing a par- 
ticular course of conduct, and the like, which gives 
to the process the appearance of a decision of the 
will, is nothing more than this. Once the circum- 
stances or situation is clearly apprehended or sup- 
posed to be clearly apprehended, the decision of the 
will to act in a certain way follows, a consequence 
of the inherent qualities and character of the whole 
man. Once satisfied on this point of knowledge, 
the will acts at once; it hesitated as a traveler 
studying the sign posts at a cross roads, not for 
want of intention to go to a particular place, but 
for want of knowledge as to which road will take 
him there. Informed of this, he goes on without 



THE WILL 9 

hesitation ; we may say he chooses this road rather 
than that, but his choice is really nothing more 
than a definite continuation of his indefinite inten- 
tion to go to that certain place previously deter- 
mined in his mind. 

The will, in other words, is the character of the 
whole man ; and his act of willing, which we usually 
call his will, is merely the manifestation of that 
character as it has to do with some particular 
occasion. His decision — or choice, if you choose 
to so style it — is not a new, original act requir- 
ing fresh initiative, the intervention of some decid- 
ing faculty that wills it at that particular instant. 
It is rather part of a continuous, connected proc- 
ess like the blooming of a flower, the growth of a 
leaf, a natural inevitable — I do not fear that 
word — working out of the whole man. 

The choice or decision of to-day was made per- 
haps centuries ago, and I am expressing in some 
act of mine to-day what a cave-dwelling ancestor 
of the stone age, a burgher of the Middle Ages, or 
an armor-clad crusader thought, felt, and was. 
To suppose, because this is so, that I give up my 
individuality, cease to be myself, and become a 
mere automaton of history, is to misconceive the 
meaning of individuality, to fail to comprehend the 
places we each occupy and hold as a part of the 
whole with relation to the whole, and the preserva- 
tion of my own identity as myself as part of the 
whole. Human identity cannot possibly consist 
in an independence of all relation with the rest of 



10 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

the Universe, with the Universe past, present, and 
future. Its identity — indeed the identity of all 
things — consists in part of these very relations. 
I am not the less myself, but am myself, a richer 
and fuller self, by reason of my stretching my 
roots back into the past, and latitudinally into all 
my environment of persons, things. My being 
part of the Universal whole does not impeach my 
identity; it rather helps to define it by stating 
what and how I stand with regard to the whole. 

To say that my will is not independent of my 
surroundings, my past, is merely another affirma- 
tion of my part in the whole ; that my will is condi- 
tioned by what surrounds and preceded it, takes 
not one whit away from its individual identity, for 
what precedes and what follows or is contempo- 
raneous with me is part of me; I am part of it. 
And so we say my act of will of to-day was pre- 
paring centuries ago without impeaching the iden- 
tity of the will as mine and nobody else's. 

The whole difficulty of the freedom of the will — 
that is, of the possibility of my identity and indi- 
viduality existing and being part of the whole of 
the Universe and yet preserving identity and indi- 
viduality as my own and nobody else's — arises 
from that mechanical thinking just adverted to, 
in which every part of the whole, every object, is 
separated from every other for the convenience of 
practical, everyday life and labor. 

Thus when we think of our will moved by motive, 
let us say, we conceive the will as one object, and 



THE WILL 11 

some motive another object, alien and utterly out- 
side the will, impinging like a cannon ball on the 
wall of the will, and so construe its effects ; whereas 
in truth a motive that really moves the will becomes 
part of the will, is the will for the time of its in- 
fluence. The will and the motive coalesce, melt 
the one into the other; in no other way could the 
motive affect the will. A motive which did not thus 
become part of the will could not affect it. That 
conception of freedom of the will which requires 
for itself absolute independence, separation of the 
will from everything else, is impossible to thought, 
for it would, if strictly followed out to its logical 
conclusion, require that a free will should have no 
objects upon which to exercise itself, for an object, 
as furnishing an occasion for the will to either 
accept or refuse it, would take away from its free- 
dom thus conceived and would present a motive, 
induce it to act or refuse to act, and to that ex- 
tent would coerce it from without itself. Such an 
absolute as this would make the will, putting it in 
a vacuum from which everything is extracted but 
its own inner essence, is so absurd a conception 
that it plainly declares the error of a reasoning 
which leads to it. 

We must think our wills, ourselves, therefore, 
not as standing alone in a vacuum with all rela- 
tions forward and back abstracted, but as bound 
together in a vast whole of the Universe of which 
all are parts, the parts in the whole, the whole in 
every part. It may not be easy to so think these 



12 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

relations of the part to the whole and the whole to 
the part without plunging into apparent contra- 
dictions. Thus I think myself as an individual, 
my own identity, by itself, distinct from all else, 
and I think thus that nothing influences me or con- 
cerns me ; I stand alone, free to do anything : so 
I conceive my identity in this aspect, but when I 
again think of myself as not so isolated, but a part 
in a vast whole, bound to it with innumerable ties 
and relations, I find what appears to be a contra- 
diction in terms. How can I be myself and free to 
do what I will, and yet be thus linked with other 
persons and things ; how can I consider myself free? 
Of course I cannot ; my freedom, my identity, is 
impossible of conception in these terms ; or, rather, 
I have the wrong conception of identity and free- 
dom, which consists not in this isolation of my 
thinking. In other words, I must revise my con- 
ception of identity and freedom, and understand 
that my identity is not a thing apart, a sort of 
absolute without relations, but that my identity 
is part of a much larger whole than myself. I 
am part of the Universe ; as such, I am in relation 
with it, and my relations with it are not a hamper 
on that identity, but help to make it up. 

But again, as part of the Universe, and with an 
identity which is related, shaped, constituted, by 
the fact that it is part of the whole, can there be 
any freedom of will, as the common phrase goes, 
under such circumstances, with an identity that is 
not independent, but part of something else? The 



THE WILL 13 

answer is that a freedom of will such as is some- 
times meant is not possible; that is a freedom of 
an absolute, an individual free of all relations, 
with nothing behind or before or around him. But 
such a conception of freedom of the will is an 
absurdity on its face; it is, when examined, im- 
possible even to thought, for unless we suppose 
some matter or thing affecting the posited abso- 
lute, we cannot understand how any exertion of 
will could take place. Without external objects 
to will about, how can such actions take place? 
And if not, then the external object, without which 
the act of will cannot be conceived, must be the 
cause in some shape of the act of will — either its 
refusal or its affirmance with respect to such object. 
All that a proper conception of freedom of will 
can mean is that the will, internally existing, has 
freedom of external expression; that is, whenever 
that inward state of feeling, habits, etc. (which 
might be called the passive will), when called upon 
to act, has freedom of expression for itself, nothing 
stops it from expressing itself in act. As long as 
a man has freedom to put his internal will into ex- 
ternal expression of act or word, that will is free, 
and it boots not to inquire how or by what process 
he acquired or became possessor of that will. 
That will is himself, and he is free as long as he 
can express that will externally in action un- 
hampered. 

His will is himself, however * gained, and like 
* James remarks: "The effort (i.e. the will) seems . . . 



14 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

himself it must be the result, the effect, of what has 
preceded it in time. But this does not make it 
less himself, for he is a part of that which preceded 
him. It is, in brief, the mystery, if you choose to 
call it so, of the relation of the part to the whole ; 
the part is itself identical, individual, separate from 
the whole; yet, again, it is part of the whole; its 
very identity as an individual, separate part is 
constituted in some respects by its being part, 
having certain relations with the whole. And, 
again, its identity and individuality help to make 
up the whole ; the whole itself would not be a com- 
plete whole lacking this part, and the identity and 
individuality of this part would not be complete 
lacking its relation to the whole. 

We might ring the changes on this conception 
of part and whole indefinitely; sufficient has been 
said to indicate that true freedom of will may be 
consistent with a connection of each individual 
part with the whole, for this is what freedom of 
will must mean: namely, that the will of the indi- 
vidual is in a measure constituted by the relation 
to the whole; that this relation with all its in- 
fluences does not impair, but rather enriches and 
helps to constitute the individual will. And this 
means that his identity as an individual, as a will, 
can exist, be consistent with his being part of the 
whole ; that his being part of the whole is not a co- 

as if it were the substantial thing which we are, and these 
(strength, wealth, intelligence, etc.) are but externals which 
we carry." " Psychology," page 578, Vol. II. 



THE WILL 15 

ercion of him, not an impairment of his identity as 
an individual, but rather an enrichment of it. A 
soldier does not lose his identity by being a private 
in a vast army. He is not, as a soldier, any less 
himself. On the contrary, his relations to the 
army, his subordination to its discipline, his place 
in its ranks, constitute a part his identity as such 
soldier, and just as his identity as an individual 
soldier constitutes in the aggregate of many such 
the power and strength of that army, so in like 
manner his being a part of that powerful army 
gives an increased richness to him as an individual : 
being such a private adds to his identity a new qual- 
ity; he represents the army, and when he acts he 
acts with all the power of that army behind him. 
And so we may say of each man whose identity is 
sought to be impeached by charging it with being 
the resultant of past centuries of causes ; that man 
is in his identity all those causes, and his identity is 
the richer for them. These causes do not coerce 
or create him or his will; they are his will. Our 
difficulty in conceiving this arises largely from that 
mechanical thinking of the world which will not 
let us conceive how one object or force may be 
itself in one sense — separate, individual — and 
yet at the same time be in and part of another 
object or force. The mechanical idea of the world 
gives us no hint of this ; in truth, forbids it ; com- 
pels us, if we would work with matter, to treat 
every force and object as if it were separate and 
opposed each to the other; the identity of one in 



16 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

and through and by reason of another, is outside 
the mechanical idea, if not utterly impossible to it. 

Thus, in reality, away from the mechanical 
world a true cause permeates, transmutes itself 
into its effect so that we may say the cause is in 
the effect. So the causes of my will — past an- 
cestors, ancient cults, what you will, that have pre- 
ceded me — are not external to me, but they are 
me as their effect. What saith the Scriptures: 
" The parents have eaten sour grapes and the 
children's teeth are set on edge. The sins of the 
parents are visited upon the children." 

This does not mean that in some external, arbi- 
trary fashion the consequences to the children fol- 
low the causes brought into being by the parents, 
but rather to affirm this doctrine I am trying to 
expound of the relation of the part, the individual 
and his identity, to the whole ; and the possibility 
of the existence of that identity alongside and 
contemporaneous with a participation of the whole 
in that identity, a permeating of each part through 
and in the whole and in every other part making 
up that whole, for the whole is made up of those 
parts. 

So understood, these expressions of the Scrip- 
tures are not arbitrary, unjust decrees by which 
some external consequence is annexed to an alien 
cause, an operation which appears unjust to the 
ordinary mind, but simply an expression of that 
connection of the individual, of each part to the 
whole, so that the act of my father is my act, my 



THE WILL 17 

act is his, his good qualities are mine: we are not 
external to each other, but part of each, so that 
there is no injustice in my suffering from his act, 
which is thus understood my act. 

Thus far the argument advanced would seem to 
answer that philosophical difficulty of thinking the 
will or men free and individual although a part and 
only a part of the great whole, of reconciling iden- 
tity and individuality with the being in relation as 
a part with all that precedes and that environs it. 

Passing, then, from this consideration of the 
will in the large, there yet remains to take up that 
which commonly is looked upon as exclusively en- 
titled to the name of will ; to wit, the specific par- 
ticular willing of some one concrete act. The 
former might be called the passive or static will — 
the man as a whole, with all his character, tastes, 
peculiar traits constituting his identity, ready to 
respond with an act when appealed to ; while the 
latter might be called the active will. 

This specific act of choice or decision on some 
occasion arising may be said to be latent in the 
character, ready to become patent when the occa- 
sion calls it forth. The static or passive will lies 
quiescent, ready to break forth into act when the 
proper moment calls it forth, like the Ley den jar, 
ready to manifest the invisible electricity with 
which it is charged, in the shape of a spark when 
the proper conductor presents itself. 

Let us study more minutely how and when this 
act of will takes place. Perhaps it has been a too 



18 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

exclusive attention to this that has led us astray 
in the larger study of the will. For undoubtedly 
here, in the specific act of willing, we have dis- 
played what at first glance would seem an act full 
of uncertainty, involving a choice or decision which 
until made is as unfixed as the wandering of a 
cloud over the blue sky of summer. Indeed, we 
predicate the freedom of that choice or decision 
very largely on the impossibility of predicting it 
in advance. If we could tell what the decision 
would be before its making, we should deny its 
freedom. But is not this an altogether mistaken 
apprehension of the transaction? 

While it may be true that the particular deter- 
mination of the will in a certain act may be un- 
fixed until made, yet the general determination may 
be perfectly fixed. On finding another's pocket- 
book, the general determination of my will is fixed 
to return it, but the particular determination, by 
what specific act I shall execute that determina- 
tion, may be uncertain. I may debate whether to 
give it to the police, to advertise it, or myself to 
seek the owner. In this sense my decision or choice 
is truly uncertain until made. It is the case of 
the traveler who knows exactly where he means to 
go, but hesitates, deliberates, and finally decides 
the particular route he will pursue. 

Examining the act of will still more closely, we 
perceive that before it takes external form and 
becomes an act in the world of matter, it is neces- 
sary that some idea of the external act should pre- 



THE WILL 19 

cede it in the consciousness. Consciousness is only 
maintained by the presence of ideas, and the power 
of fixing attention on this or that idea in con- 
sciousness to the exclusion of others is essential to 
the process of thinking; without it, thinking would 
not be possible. 

And William James in his " Psychology " tells 
us in so many words that this is also an essential of 
the act of willing, this effort or power of attention 
to one of a number of ideas. When attention is 
fixed on some one idea as an idea to be executed, the 
act of will is complete, and the external expression 
of it in deed follows, as we might say, automati- 
cally. 

" To attend to it (the idea) is the volitional act 
and the only inward volitional act which we ever 
perform." James' " Psychology," Vol. II, page 
567. 

It is just here in the philosophical discussion of 
the willing of some specific act that we fall into the 
greatest confusion, flounder in contradictions that 
are little short of the ridiculous ; for example, the 
dilemma of the Middle Ages of the donkey starving 
to death between two equally attractive bundles 
of straw.* We are, therefore, warned to beware 

* The absurdity of this can be readily seen if the reader, 
accepting James' analysis of the will-action, will follow out 
for himself the process. For if the final act of will on the 
internal side be the fixing of the attention on some object or 
act to be performed — the acting idea of my nomenclature 
— we must suppose the donkey or the man (the process is 
for both, we take it, identical) to have fixed his attention on. 



20 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

our steps, much like the traveler who, repeatedly 
falling into quagmires, begins to suspect that he 
has lost his way. 

say bundle of straw A, and that this is so fixed that it will 
not suffer him to go to bundle B ; in other words it is a will 
act complete in every respect except the putting of it into 
external execution; and to prevent this we are asked to sup- 
pose that in precisely the same manner the man or the don- 
key's attention is fixed on bundle of straw B ; or to put it a 
little differently, we suppose the mind of our actor to be 
fixed with attention on both A and B at the same time, and 
to have formed so complete a will action on the internal side 
with regard to both that he is able to perform neither of the 
acts, one negativing the other. This is, of course, a piece of 
mental gymnastics that is impossible. A man cannot fix at- 
tention on two ideas at once with equal intensity: one idea 
will always have the greater attention, occupy the mind to 
the exclusion of the other. Still less can he have two oppos- 
ing wills at the same time, any more than he can say " Yes " 
and " No " in the same breath ; the one idea can only nega- 
tive the other by excluding it; it would thus get itself exe- 
cuted as the only will idea present. Our problem, while 
acknowledging, and, in fact, making its whole signif- 
icance turn on the point, that a will to go to bundle A is the 
exact contradictory of the will to go to bundle B, so that 
one destroys the other and makes an execution of either act 
impossible, yet neglects this antecedent impossibility that 
no actor can be possessed of two contradictory wills at the 
same time. If the problem posits in the first place a com- 
plete internal will action to go to bundle A, as it must, then 
the intrusion of another will action to go to B is an impos- 
sibility while the first will action to go to A is in possession 
of the consciousness ; if the tendency to go to B does become 
a will act, it can only do so by displacing the will action to 
go to A ; it cannot exist at the same time, for if the will to 
go to B is a complete will act, it must possess consciousness 
to the exclusion of any other; so only do will actions com- 
plete themselves on the internal side. 
The whole difficulty arises, as probably M. Bergson would 



THE WILL 21 

Freedom of will is thus in reality a necessity for 
the possibility of thought. Power to think seems 
to involve as a necessary condition freedom to fix 
attention at pleasure on one or another of the items 
of the content of consciousness, and this is almost 
identical with the internal act of will. Thus we 
may say if our thinking is free — " free as 
thought " is a familiar expression of everyday 
speech — our willing, which is essentially the same 
process, must also be free. Parodying Des Cartes, 
we might declare " Cogito ergo liber sum." I 
think, therefore, I have freedom of choice of ideas, 
and so of acts. 

This freedom of the immediate act of willing does 
not answer the more sweeping objection to ultimate 
freedom of will or of thought which grows out of 
that mechanical conception of the Universe already 

tell us, from the defect of thinking living reality in the 
mechanical terms of the carpenter. If our actor were a 
block of wood with two cables attached to him, each pulling 
a different way with equal force and at the same moment, 
we would have that perfect equilibrium which would forbid 
any movement in either direction, and he would remain sta- 
tionary in accordance with the well known law of mechanics. 

But the man or the donkey are not lifeless; before any 
force can act upon them, it must undergo certain transfor- 
mations; the motive influencing him to go to A must 
enter his consciousness, be taken up there and become part 
of the internal modifications of the consciousness, one of 
which modifications forbids the coming into consciousness 
and the transformation of a motive to go to B into a will 
act at the same moment that a will to go to A possesses con- 
sciousness. 

None but the schoolmen would have thought of such a 
ridiculous playing with words divorced from all reality. 



22 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

discussed, in which I am figured as the mere re- 
sultant of what has preceded me, which looks upon 
me as merely the effect produced by multitudinous 
preceding causes, so that I think and will only as 
I am constituted by these. My selection of a 
course of conduct, my attention to some particular 
idea, is thus construed to be a pre-ordained reac- 
tion to outward stimuli. It might be a partial 
answer to this to ask how any differences of action 
or of thought could thus ever arise among men 
similarly placed with regard to all outward cir- 
cumstances, the product of like causes, and sub- 
jected to the same stimuli. Yet we know very 
considerable differences do arise, and since the be- 
ginning of time have arisen. How many thinking 
creatures do you suppose saw an apple fall before 
Sir Isaac Newton, or how many philosophers took 
baths before Archimedes cried " Eureka ! " rushing 
naked through the streets of Syracuse? 

But this objection has already been met by the 
criticism already made of that mechanical notion 
of the Universe and its parts which conceives the 
individual, the part, as having merely a lifeless 
mechanical relation to the whole, so that the part 
has no share in the whole. I, as a part of the 
whole, permeate the whole as a part of it, and the 
whole permeates me, so that I am not mechanically 
moved by it or by the other parts of it, but my 
movements, my willing, my thinking, are my own 
moving, willing, thinking ; if they were not my own, 
they would not be part of that whole, for I am 



THE WILL 23 

part of the whole; it is through me that they find 
connection and share in the whole. It is because 
I share in the whole that these other parts of the 
whole affect me, for they do not affect me, influence 
me, as mechanical objects in a mechanical world 
affect each other, impinging externally one on the 
other, but they affect me by becoming part of me, 
permeating me, being me. An object of desire, a 
motive to an act, cannot influence me unless it 
become part of me; I must take it into myself be- 
fore it has any effect on me, and then it affects 
me as part of myself. 

Returning to the study of the immediate act, 
we perceive that it primarily consists in fixing the 
attention on some particular idea in consciousness 
with the purpose of giving it external expression 
in act. And we distinguish in the process two ele- 
ments : There is first the object or thing in con- 
nection with which the act is intended. Without 
object, the will would have nothing upon which to 
act; some stimuli from without must occur to call 
forth the exercise of the will. More will be said 
of this when we come to the education of the will. 
The idea in consciousness of this object of the in- 
tended act might be called the substantive idea, 
the idea calling for the act; and the following 
consequent idea of the act to be done in connection 
with it might be called the acting idea. The con- 
nection between these two is often of a very in- 
flexible sort ; fixed union of many substantive ideas 
with acting ideas is the characteristic of all men, 



24 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

and the more civilized men are, the more numerous 
are such unions found to be. In fact, the whole 
process of civilization in the domain of law and 
morals might be said to consist in the establishment 
and multiplication of these. 

Without objects to call it forth the will would 
have no occasion to act ; these substantive ideas 
must first arise in the consciousness before any act- 
ing idea can be joined to them. How and when 
and by what process these acting ideas become 
joined to the substantive, or in plain terms, with 
what acts the ordinary man responds to the objects 
of his desire that present themselves to him, is now 
our care. Experience is very largely the teacher 
of the various acting ideas to which the substantive 
ideas are to be joined. Many of the most fixed 
connections are so established. Thus the object 
food, presenting itself and appearing as an idea in 
consciousness, the acting idea of eating very surely 
couples itself to it ; or the object fire, making itself 
known as a substantive idea, the acting idea of 
keeping out of it follows as the result of experience, 
embodied in the popular saying, " The burnt child 
dreads the fire." So we might traverse the entire 
field of our ordinary daily life and conduct, tracing 
for almost every substantive idea a corresponding 
acting idea furnished originally by experience, but 
which now from long usage recurs almost auto- 
matically with it. 

But experience is not the only teacher of the 
connection between substantive and acting ideas; 



THE WILL 25 

there is a more purposeful, what might be called a 
more artificial, process, as distinguished from the 
natural process of experience, by which these con- 
nections are established. All moral teaching is of 
this sort, and by this means all moral transforma- 
tions of character are wrought. For it is evident 
that these connections of substantive and acting 
ideas, fixed in the individual consciousness, consti- 
tute his character, his will in large part. And 
when we seek to reform an evil character, it is by 
way of putting the proper acting ideas in connec- 
tion with all substantive ideas that may occur. 
How, in detail, this education of the will is accom- 
plished may be postponed until we reach that sub- 
ject. What we may now notice is, first, the man- 
ner in which the connection is established between 
the acting idea and the substantive idea. It is 
not by pleasant or unpleasant sensations, those 
potent instruments of experience, but by a very 
different procedure, — by a presenting to the con- 
sciousness again and again, until there is duly im- 
pressed on it the acting idea which is sought to be 
connected with the substantive idea. How this 
connection between the two is strengthened, em- 
phasized, and rendered permanent, so that the two 
ideas become firmly welded together, belongs to 
the subsequent subject of the education of the 
will. 

What now concerns us is the very interesting 
consequences which follow the connection of these 
elements of the will-action. When a certain act- 



26 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

ing idea is thus tied to some substantive idea in 
consciousness, the impulse and desire to put the 
acting idea into execution becomes so strong and 
so insistent that, regardless of the pleasurable or 
painful sensations that may accompany it, the 
mere putting into execution of the idea becomes an 
end in and for itself. This realization of the will 
has been well defined by a recent writer : 

" It means the identity of content between the 
preceding and the resulting experience. ... In 
every complete will-action the idea of the end must 
precede the perception of the end." * 

The same writer well points out the distinction, 
for our purpose so important to be drawn, be- 
tween the gratification of the sense obtained by 
the doing of an act and the satisfaction of the will 
by its realization in act. I may form the acting 
idea of taking a necessary but nauseous dose of 
medicine, and in proceeding to swallow it find that 
by some mistake I have taken a draught of deli- 
cious wine. I have, in spite of myself, the pleasure 
of the sensation the wine affords, but I have missed 
the satisfaction of my will. In all probability my 
disgust at my error, the failure to realize my will, 
will altogether destroy the physical pleasure of the 
wine drinking. 

This realization of the will and the satisfaction 

derived from it is a great compelling motive for 

the translating of the idea into deed, the making 

the internal will into an actual deed of the external 

* " Eternal Values " : Munsterberg, page 72. 



THE WILL n 

world without regard to the getting of any pleas- 
urable sensation of a physical sort thereby. 
That this is true we find well attested, not only by 
the great, but by the trivial transactions of our 
daily life; indeed, in the latter, because they are 
so apparently unaccountable and almost absurd, 
we find the most convincing proof. For trifling 
habits, tricks of speech, of manner, of walk, a thou- 
sand unconsidered ways of acting, there is no other 
possible explanation. I go to a particular shop, 
make some peculiar gesture when speaking, take 
a certain path when walking, not that these afford 
greater pleasurable sensations than any other shop, 
gesture, or path, but simply because these particu- 
lar acting ideas habitually arise and follow, are 
linked with the substantive idea of a shop, a speech, 
a walk, and so their execution is the realization of 
the will in each case, and as such produces the satis- 
faction that realization of the will affords. 

In the larger acts of life this realization of the 
will plays the supreme part; we might say that 
life for the most of us is made up of our attempts 
to realize our internal will in the external world. 
We may recall innumerable instances in the careers 
of inventors, statesmen, poets, scientific or philo- 
sophical investigators, explorers, whose lives are 
made up of struggles to realize their wills — in 
other words, to carry out as deeds in the external 
world their internal thoughts, plans, schemes, 
ideals ; some vague and indefinite, as the search for 
the philosopher's stone or the Elixir of Life; 



28 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

others fixed and definite, as the repeal of the Corn 
laws, the abolition of slavery, the building of the 
Pacific Railroad, the cutting of the Panama Canal, 
the finding of the source of the Nile or the North 
Pole. 

When we come to discuss the happiness of the 
good will, we shall see why and how this realization 
of the will exerts such compelling force as a motive 
to action. Before leaving, however, this analysis 
of the will action, it may be in place to note the 
part played by this realization of the will, and its 
compelling force in the formation and constitution 
of what we, for want of a better term, call charac- 
ter. 

Character depends on this for its very existence, 
for character is nothing more than the habit of 
acting in a particular way in response to a demand 
of some particular situation, circumstance, or 
thing. And it is made up of these couplings of 
innumerable substantive and acting ideas in such 
a firm union that one follows the other with scarcely 
a thought of hesitation, and so governs the con- 
duct of the individual, because the putting the 
acting idea into execution constitutes the realiza- 
tion of the will which, we shall see hereafter, as 
part of the harmony of will with will, goes to make 
the highest happiness of which we are capable. 

Habits of honesty, of sobriety, of right conduct, 
after long years' usurp, seem to substitute them- 
selves for all the teachings of experience or of more 
deliberate reasoning which may have originally 



THE WILL 29 

fixed them in consciousness. So that many a good 
man may truly say, " I am honest, not from any 
deep or profound reflection, any moral reasoning on 
the subject each time the decision is required of me, 
but simply because no other or different course of 
conduct occurs to me ; no other but one particular 
acting-idea is called up by the substantive idea 
when it appears in consciousness and some action 
is demanded. The perception of another man's 
pocket-book at my feet calls up the acting-idea of 
returning it forthwith, and the action of so return- 
ing it follows without deliberation or debate, auto- 
matically, we might say, from mere habit." 

A writer in the Edinburgh Review, October, 1909, 
page 333, refers to this psychological phenomenon 
in very similar terms : " A man refrains from 
stealing, not from fear of going to hell, nor from 
abstract considerations of the greatest number, but 
because he feels within him an emotion of disgust 
at the idea of stealing which would make the act 
painful in a high degree to perform." And in like 
manner he alleviates distress ; not with the hope of 
getting back his outlay in the future life, or to 
promote the happiness of the greatest number, 
" but because a direct, positive gratification from 
the act accrues to him. It is more pleasant to him 
to perform these good actions than not to perform 
them." " Morality," the same writer adds, " is 
an instinct ; in so far as it is acquired, it is a habit." 

We do not call that man a person of good 
character who hesitates when the question presents 



30 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

itself of returning or not returning another's prop- 
erty, but only that man whose acting-idea in this 
respect follows automatically, as we might say, 
the substantive idea of pocket-book, money or other 
property of another, and impels the translation of 
it into deed without deliberation or hesitation. 
He has no choice, entertains no thought about it 
save that single acting-idea which spontaneously, 
as a habit, springs up in his mind at the very idea 
of another's property, and impels him to render it 
back to its owner. That is to say, in other 
words, with a man of good character the idea of 
another man's property is so firmly connected with 
the idea of certain acts tending to preserve and 
respect it, so separated and divided from the acts 
tending to take or injure it, that the attempt to 
alter that connection, to disconnect the one and 
to connect the other, yields a feeling of discomfort, 
even in thought, and the further carrying out of 
this into action creates a feeling so unpleasant as 
to amount to a positive repugnance. 

And yet it is possible to imagine, in the case of 
an habitual thief, that the very opposite connection 
of idea and act may exist, so that the very idea of 
another's property calls up the inevitable connec- 
tion, not of respecting it as his, but of taking it 
from him, and that a feeling of positive dissatisfac- 
tion may arise from the failure to carry out the 
connection in conduct by a corresponding act. 
And so we may say of the man possessed of the 
first connection of ideas, he is a man of good char- 



THE WILL 31 

acter ; his will, which we now see is his character, is 
a good will. Nor could we justly assert that either 
act was not a true act of free will because foreor- 
dained in each instance by the character of the will. 

Even if it be conceded that there is no power of 
choice in these instances, that because of his char- 
acter the man must choose one and not the other 
act, is not the act so chosen even more his act than 
if it were merely the choice of the moment by a 
species of chance? Is not the man more identified 
with an act expressing his whole fixed character 
than by an act which, until performed, is but the 
uncertain creature of a sudden resolve? 

The justification of the rewards and punish- 
ments meted out to acts of this sort is surely 
clearer than for the other uncertain acts which are 
the product of a sudden, unpremeditated choice. 
Freedom of will of this sort is always invoked to 
justify those rewards and punishments of gov- 
ernment and society which are imposed by an alien, 
external power, outside the man himself. This 
may be very well for practical ethics, for the re- 
quirements of the administration of justice by hu- 
man tribunals, the essential matter being always 
the effectiveness of these external agencies on con- 
duct. In theoretical ethics these externals have 
no place, and its rewards and punishments require 
no justification, for the good or evil will is its 
own reward or punishment. An evil will is itself 
the severest punishment; it requires no external 
power to make it effective, no elaborate reasoning 



32 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

to show its justice. In like manner the good will 
is its own reward. In this view it is as impossible 
to separate conduct and its appropriate guerdon 
as to tear asunder soul and body. Good will is 
happiness, evil will is misery, and nothing can 
alter or change them; as well might we declare 
that fire should not burn, nor steel cut. For this 
internal will, made up of his traits, tastes, his 
ideas, natural or artificial, his feelings, and 
thoughts, are the man, and so have been recog- 
nized by all ethical authority. The Scriptures 
express the same idea when they declare " As a 
man thinketh so is he " ; the Indian Sacred Books, 
" The Dhamapada," Chapter I, repeat : " All that 
we are is the result of what we have thought; it 
is founded on our thought; it is made up of our 
thoughts." 

Man's will, then, in the sense of theoretical 
ethics, is more than a mere capacity to respond 
and act freely under the influence of motive. It 
is the very essence of himself, the sum total of all 
his qualities, mental and moral, his appetites, de- 
sires, both natural and acquired. It is passive as 
well as active, a state or condition as well as an 
activity, a doing or intention to do something. 

Having thus analyzed what the will is, let us 
now consider how and when we first learn some- 
thing of will in experience, how the significance of 
will first dawns upon us, for like all our knowledge, 
what we know of our will comes to us gradually 
and by experience. Thus we learn that there are 



PARTICULAR AND UNIVERSAL 33 

two wills, — our own and another or opposing will, 
as we might at first be tempted to style it, but 
which we later learn to call, as differing from our 
own, the Universal will, for so we find ourselves 
compelled to think, and, for convenience, to unite 
under a single intelligible name of Universal will 
all those opposing forces of nature and man which 
frequently baffle, contradict, resist, and even de- 
feat, our own will expressed in action. 



THE PARTICULAR AND UNIVERSAL WILL 

It may be said, we suppose, without fear of con- 
tradiction, that in all the numerous and varied ex- 
periences of our daily life two main, commanding 
features stand forth, gigantic, all-absorbing, of 
overmastering import. Coming upon us at first 
somewhat in the nature of a discovery, they color 
and give significance to all the transactions in 
which we find ourselves engaged. 

These are the two forces or activities which make 
themselves known to a man the moment he becomes 
an active agent, an actor in the world of actors 
and activities: the first, his own activity as such 
actor; the second, an alien, foreign activity or 
striving that confronts his own activity, opposes 
it, hedges it in, limits it, perhaps finally defeats 
it. 

This opposing activity manifests itself in a thou- 



34 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

sand ways, making him realize its importance and 
its effect as opposing his own activity, restraining, 
sometimes suppressing it altogether. It may take 
the form of inert resistance, the inertia of dead 
matter — the stone that blocks his path, forbids 
his passage; it may be the active assault of the 
storm that tosses his frail ship on the bosom of 
great waters ; it may be the laws of his own mind 
that will not permit him to think save in one way ; 
it may be the efforts of a fellowman whose striving 
opposes itself to his own. 

All these activities or compulsions, varying in 
their manifestations, but having this one charac- 
teristic in common that they contradict and limit 
our own activity, bring us to a sharp realization 
of the conflict between our will, which we may call 
the will of the individual, the particular will, and 
that something set over against our will, manifest- 
ing itself in various ways, but which by the laws 
of our thinking we have to gather together and 
unite as all the activity of one universal, all-power- 
ful will, the Universal will. It is this that gov- 
erns and directs these compulsions of matter and 
mind that are continually confronting us in our 
daily life, the dealing with which in various ways 
largely occupies and fills that life. 

The matter of names is not important; the 
names " particular will," as representing best our 
own activity, and " Universal will," as represent- 
ing the opposing activity, seems a convenient 
method of grouping the two activities whose chief 



PARTICULAR AND UNIVERSAL 35 

distinguishing characteristic may be thus indi- 
cated. 

That particular will may be but the cry of the 
child for a sweet denied it by its nurse or its 
parent; it may be the laying of an Atlantic cable, 
defeated by a turbulent ocean ; it may be the fram- 
ing of some philosophic thought, baffled and driven 
into self-contradiction by some compulsion of 
thought. Is not, indeed, all of life made up of this 
ebb and flow, strophe and anti-strophe, effort and 
repulse, of particular as against Universal will? 

We know the particular will directly and imme- 
diately as our own ; and all that independent of our 
will, not subject to our control, we recognize as 
part of the Universal will by these characteristics, 
— namely, by the compelling power it exercises 
over us and by its entire independence of our par- 
ticular will. For by a compulsion of our thinking 
we are thus led to construe and interpret the vary- 
ing forms of that opposing activity confronting 
our own at every turn and in all its manifold mani- 
festations. In no other way can we intelligently 
think these activities save as governed and directed 
by some single power. Such power as we have to 
think it must be self-determining, self-initiating, 
exercising intelligent choice, acting without exter- 
nal cause. In short, it must be a true first cause. 
Our difficulty in thinking this Universal will — 
that is a cause which is not an effect of some other 
cause further back — does not relieve us from the 
necessity. We must think a self-determining, in- 



36 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

itiating power at the beginning of the series of all 
the activities other than our own, which power 
must be the source of these activities, must deter- 
mine the course of action which we find them ex- 
hibiting. In other words, the only intelligible 
explanation of them is that they are manifestations 
of will and of a will that is in the last analysis a 
will with all the characteristics of a will as we 
know it, having self-initiating power, intelligence, 
but with this additional quality, — it is Universal, 
and governs all but the internal activity of man 
himself. 

We cannot carry back these activities in an 
unending chain of cause and effect forever, and so 
we must attribute them to some cause, not only 
that has power of itself to initiate action, but also 
power to intelligently direct such action with a 
view to results. It is impossible to believe that 
these activities with all their reciprocal relations 
to each other are spontaneous, accidental displays 
of energy, occurring without fixed rule, — we must 
consider them as governed by law; and the only 
beginning or source of such law conceivable by us 
is a will somewhere back in the apparently endless 
chain of causes which prescribes the method as well 
as initiates the coming into existence of these ac- 
tivities ; in other words, gives law to them. 

This, then, is the Universal will as presented to 
us in experience, set over against our own particu- 
lar will, opposed to and often defeating it. We 
cannot declare that we do not know it, for it is one 



PARTICULAR AND UNIVERSAL 37 

of the main facts of all our living; yet on the 
other hand we can scarcely be said to understand 
it, conveyed to us as it is under the veil of in- 
numerable concrete particular instances. It is our 
problem to unravel from these particulars, these 
concrete instances, the Universal will. For this 
task we may appeal to one or two principles which 
will approve themselves as infallible guides. First, 
we may be sure that whatever we find common to 
all particulars must be part of the Universal will, 
for so only can we account for such omnipresence ; 
and secondly, whatever we find of irresistible, com- 
pelling power in any particular, we must pronounce 
Universal, for only so can we account for that 
quality. It may be said that often that which we 
find irresistible and inevitable in one instance, to 
the wider experience, a fuller knowledge, sometimes 
becomes docile to our own particular will, so that 
we compel it rather than, as formerly, are com- 
pelled by it. But this merely concerns the appli- 
cation of the principle or criterion to some par- 
ticular; it does not impeach the principle itself. 
Both these principles are plainly laws of our think- 
ing; we have to think our world and all the 
concrete experiences which make it up as under 
the government of a single and all-powerful will. 
We exempt ourselves from subjection to this will 
only by reason of a consciousness that we are not 
coerced by it in our acting. While we cannot 
think how this may be or that it is at all, still we 
act as if we were free because so we feel ourselves. 



38 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

The Universal will must be in every particular 
that goes to make up that world, and it must be a 
compelling, irresistible will, to which every par- 
ticular is subject without exception. 

These are compulsions of our thinking from 
which it is impossible for us to escape, and so these 
compulsions of our thinking are themselves part of 
the Universal will that we find coercing, restrain- 
ing, limiting our own particular will at every turn. 
By this, however, is not meant that all minds, 
however untutored or uneducated, recognize these 
principles as thus stated; but each mind, savage 
or civilized, according to its mental capacity, in 
its thinking of all the world about it, acts and 
construes it under the compulsion of these princi- 
ples, formulates its ideas to correspond, as far as 
it has capacity, to these principles. 

It is to be noted that these principles are com- 
pulsions of our thinking only ; what further valid- 
ity they have may, for the sake of clearness of 
treatment, be postponed to a later discussion. 

Resuming now the main thread of the discussion 
of the will : We have seen that there are two wills, 
the particular — that of each individual ; and the 
Universal — the will that governs all, that is ex- 
pressed and known to us only as we can know it 
by these concrete instances in which we come in 
contact with it — the phenomena of nature, the 
immovable stone, the fierce storm, the compulsions 
of thought, the activity of other men whose par- 
ticular wills are themselves instances, concrete and 



PARTICULAR AND UNIVERSAL 39 

individual expressions, of the Universal will; for 
all particular wills have this double significance 
that they are in one aspect individual, concrete, 
and so a particular will ; in the other aspect they 
are, notwithstanding that particularity, an ex- 
pression of the Universal will, have in them some 
elements of the Universal will. 

We distinguish, therefore, in all particular wills 
considered with regard to the Universal will, two 
elements ; first, this compulsory element which we 
have just seen is the mark and sign of the Uni- 
versal will, is the expression of the Universal will 
in the particular. This element consists in those 
appetites, those laws of thought, which are imposed 
on the particular will, are independent of its con- 
trol, and are common to all particular wills. 

Perhaps it were well to here mark the distinction 
so well made by Hegel in his " Philosophy of Re- 
ligion," that these various particular wills, ob- 
served in the activities of the external world — 
in men, in nature, in the raging storm, the lashing, 
waves, the devouring beasts of prey — are not 
themselves in their totality the Universal will, they 
are but its manifestations. It is their essence, 
their directing, all-compelling power, that drives 
and guides them, but is never they, never identifies 
itself with them; such a doctrine would be truly 
pantheism. The present doctrine is expressed in 
St. Paul's declaration : " In whom we move and 
breathe and have our being." The Universal will 
is the basis and foundation of all these particular 



40 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

wills, and from them, by a proper generalization, 
we may sift out the Universal will. In so doing 
we eliminate the particular, seize and separate the 
elements of the Universal by application of these 
two criterions just referred to, compulsion and 
ubiquitousness ; for the Universal will must be in 
every particular and it must be compelling. 

Upon this, two remarks are called for. One is 
that all acts done under the evident compulsion of 
this element of the Universal will carry with them 
a sanction all their own which is expressed in 
popular language when referring to such act by 
the statement that such-and-such an act is per- 
fectly " natural " — that is, in accordance with 
these simple, primitive instincts, appetites, desires, 
that are common to all men and are their own jus- 
tification. In other words, these acts, being the 
direct product of the elements of the will imposed 
by the Universal will, carry with them their own 
evidence of rightness. 

The second remark is that these elements, being 
common to all particular wills, can have no power 
of conferring that individuality on the particular 
will which we observe and know in actual experi- 
ence. Knowing how differently men act under the 
same circumstances, we are compelled to assume 
that there must be some other element in the will 
beside these to account for such difference, to con- 
stitute the particularity of the particular will as 
over against the Universal. What that second 
element is we now have to consider, never forget- 



PARTICULAR AND UNIVERSAL 41 

ting, however, that the first elements of the will, 
the Universal elements, although unable to account 
for the differences in particular wills, are yet the 
foundation and basis of them, for without natural 
appetites there would be no will. They are essen- 
tial parts of the particular will and cannot be omit- 
ted simply because of their being part of all wills. 
All wills in this respect are but the concrete ex- 
pression of the Universal will. 

It is in this second element of the particular will 
that all ethical interest centers, for this is the 
element which is under the control of the man him- 
self. His appetites and passions are largely be- 
yond his control; they cannot be increased or 
diminished save in so far as he may do this through 
the second element of the will. This it is that 
marks the particular will peculiar, individual, and 
independent of the Universal will. For in all wills, 
in addition to the appetites, passions, laws of 
thought, imposed by the Universal will, there are 
certain arrangements of ideas, combinations or 
conjunctions of ideas and acts corresponding to 
them, which give each particular will that color of 
individuality that distinguishes it from every other 
particular will. These are those connections of 
substantive and acting ideas which have already 
been discussed in our analysis of the will-action. 
Summarizing what was there said, we may point 
out that there are three chief methods by which 
these connections are established for the will. 
First, experience, by pleasurable and painful sensa- 



42 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

tions, connects certain substantive with certain 
acting ideas ; fire, with avoiding it or seeking it, as 
the case may be; food, with eating; and so on. 
Second, by the simple juxtaposition of sensations 
from the external world, by the presentation of two 
ideas in conjunction, the will is often led to exe- 
cute the acting idea; this is what might be called 
suggestion, or sometimes the force of example; 
when somebody else puts an idea into execution, 
joins an acting idea to a substantive, we are 
prompted to do the like. Let one man start to 
run for a train, and all other intending passengers, 
his companions, are extremely likely to follow his 
example, — in other words, to put into execution 
the acting idea of running which his act has sug- 
gested in connection with the substantive idea of 
a train. Third, there is the deliberate and studied 
suggestion of acting ideas (of which the second 
class is a mere chance example) by impressing the 
ideas on the consciousness in connection with the 
substantive so that it will always be so linked that 
the simple recurrence of the substantive idea will 
always call for that particular acting idea. The 
methods by which this impression is made upon 
the will are to be considered under the " Education 
of the Will," for it is this third process of teach- 
ing, educating the will, which makes possible all 
ethical improvement and is the instrument of that 
change of individual character which, in the larger, 
more serious aspect, is called moral reformation, 
the making of a good man out of a bad man, or its 



THE GOOD WILL 43 

reverse of degeneration and moral degradation. 
We may be said now to have some idea of what 
the individual particular will really is, the elements 
which make it up, and what are its relations to the 
Universal will, a very essential piece of knowledge 
when we come to discuss the next branch of our 
inquiry, namely and secondly : 



THE GOOD WILL 

From the preceding exposition of the relations 
of the particular will to the Universal will, it is 
plain what the definition of a good will must be. 
Philosophically defined, a good will is a will in 
harmony with the Universal will. And this har- 
mony of the particular will with the Universal will 
at the same time constitutes the highest happiness 
of the particular will. It is that surnmum bonum 
of which so much has been written. Virtue (the 
harmony of the particular with the Universal will) 
and the reward of virtue, happiness, are thus re- 
vealed as identical. Right conduct and happiness 
are not placed over against each other as two 
opposing somethings, different, separate, uncon- 
nected save by arbitrary decree or at best related 
in some mysterious way as cause and effect, but 
stand forth as they really are, the same thing 
viewed from opposite points. This happiness of 
the good will we leave for further exposition at a 
later, more convenient place in our discussion. 



44 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

We now take up the good will and its harmony 
with the Universal will as the test of its goodness. 

Let us consider why a good will must always be 
a harmonious will and why a conflicting will is an 
evil will. This fundamental notion grows out of a 
compulsion of our thinking, which may be vari- 
ously stated according to the particular view taken 
for the moment. Perhaps the clearest statement 
is that we must think that the world, the Universe, 
is a consistent harmonious whole ; that one uniform 
rule or law governs to this end all its activities, 
including our own activities as a part ; that there- 
fore any conflict in these activities is wrong and 
to be suppressed. And we may, for convenience, 
as the nearest approach to the reality that we are 
capable of, style the Power that promulgates and 
enforces this harmony of all the parts the Uni- 
versal will, thus meaning to designate that al- 
mighty, intelligent Power which we have to regard 
as the governor of all things. We think of this 
Power, such is our feeble capacity, under the guise 
of a human being of extraordinary endowments, 
and we call him God, not knowing exactly, and not 
being able to know exactly, what that mighty 
Power is which we thus name. 

If any thinker doubt the truth of this compul- 
sion of thinking, let him make the experiment of 
trying to think the Universe otherwise than gov- 
erned by one uniform and Universal law: Can 
he for one moment delude his mind into thinking 
that the world and its phenomena act without law, 



THE UNIVERSAL WILL 45 

that they have no relation each part to each? He 
must then suppose that each part of all the world 
made known to him is independent of every other 
part ; in effect this is to posit a condition much 
more impossible to thought than any other, for it 
makes of each part an absolute, — i.e., something 
without relation to any other part. The moment 
he departs from this, he finds himself driven to the 
logical opposite of supposing that there is a rela- 
tion between all the parts that make up the Uni- 
verse ; and if any relation, then he must think some 
basis for that relation ; — and so of necessity his 
thinking compels him to the conclusion stated 
above, a Universal will. 

We do not venture at this stage of the discus- 
sion to consider the validity of thus thinking; 
whether, in other words, thought and reality cor- 
respond. All that is now contended is that we 
must think this, just as we think twice two are 
four. 



KNOWLEDGE OF THE UNIVERSAL WILL 

It may well be asked : " How are we, who know 
only the particular and concrete, who see only by 
fragments and snatches, to get any knowledge of 
the Universal will as it is thus made known to us ? " 
It must be learned, of course, only by inference 
from the particular and the individual instances 
which are its concrete expression. In other words, 



46 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

in each and every particular will there is and must 
be an element of Universality. How we are to 
know and recognize it is the question for us to an- 
swer. We have already taken a step toward that 
answer in ascertaining, as we have just done, that 
the expression in the particular will of desires — 
appetites, such as hunger and thirst, which are be- 
yond the control of the particular will, while at 
the same time part of it — bears the mark of Uni- 
versality by reason of this very character. And 
we may easily take the next step toward our an- 
swer by adding that all the primitive desires of 
the particular will have this character of necessity, 
of freedom from the arbitrary control of the par- 
ticular will. 

As already pointed out, our difficulty begins 
when, holding all these manifestations of each par- 
ticular will as without evil quality, we consider 
each particular will in its relations with every 
other particular will no longer ideally independent 
and isolated, but in relation, and possibly in con- 
flict, with other wills. My hunger right in itself 
and by itself may come into conflict with your 
hunger, equally right in and by itself; and it is 
plain that the Universal will must afford a recon- 
ciliation of all these particular wills, not by their 
destruction — by the negativing of these appetites, 
this hunger, thirst, etc., — but by giving each its 
true existence in harmony with each other and with 
itself. 

How far this individual will may assert itself 



THE UNIVERSAL WILL 47 

without becoming an evil will was defined by Kant 
in his famous declaration : " Act so that thy 
maxim may be capable of becoming the Universal 
natural law of all rational beings." * 

This simply enunciated the obvious truth that if 
we grant the right of each particular will to be 
itself, there must go with it the implied limitation 
that it must not infringe the right of any other 
particular will to be itself ; that is, it must not op- 
pose or conflict with the Universal will, which a 
transgression of the rights of any other particular 
will would do, since every particular will is also 
and in like manner a concrete expression of the 
Universal will in all these primitive, elemental de- 
sires and appetites. 

This highly abstract theoretical expression of 
the rule of conduct is not easy for the common 
man to master or apply to the ordinary affairs of 
everyday life. The same rule has been formu- 
lated in the famous Christian maxim : " Whatso- 
ever ye would that men should do to you, do ye 
even so to them." ** 

This we are told is the law and the prophets. 
In the latter rule we have a practical guide, fur- 
nished not by acute reasoning, but ready to hand 
in our own natural feeling, requiring no thought, 
no intellectual exercise. We have only to consult 
our feelings to act correctly, and yet in its essence 

* Paulsen's " Immanuel Kant " : Creighton & Lef re's Trans- 
lation, 1902; page 306. 
** Matthew VII: 12. 



48 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

the rule is the same. I am to treat the wishes of 
others as I would my own, to preserve their par- 
ticularity and respect it as my own. If a question 
arise as to some act, I have only to ask myself 
how I would regard that proposed act if some one 
were to commit it with respect to myself, and if I 
feel it no trespass on my particularity, there is 
good reason to suppose that it will be none on his. 
Both rules mean that all individual wills are to 
have free expression, to be unrestricted, except 
when such expression shall interfere with the de- 
sires and appetites of some other particular will. 

For it must be evident that if the acts of any 
particular will be such as to come into conflict with 
those of other particular wills, one or the other, or 
possibly both wills, must cease to so act. Con- 
flicting particular wills, expressed in opposing ap- 
petites and desires, can never be in harmony with 
a Universal will, for a Universal will must reconcile 
all conflicting wills in such a way that each par- 
ticular will shall maintain its own identity — have 
its own desires, appetites, etc. — and yet not in- 
fringe the identity of any other particular will ex- 
pressed in its desires, appetites, etc. 

This assumes that the particular will, with its 
desires, appetites and needs, is in itself and by 
itself good, or at least without any evil quality in 
and of itself. This assumption does not, however, 
have the effect, as at first it might seem, of erect- 
ing each particular will as its own standard of 
good and evil. This is not to declare in terms that 



THE UNIVERSAL WILL 49 

whatever / want is right ; that my feeling of pleas- 
ure or of pain, of desire or of repulsion, makes any 
particular act good or evil. It is not my individ- 
ual arbitrary will that is erected as a standard, 
but only my will as it registers the decrees of the 
Universal will. 

In other words, we see that this particular will 
is, in another aspect, a part of the Universal will; 
that without particular wills, which go to make 
up the Universal will, there would be no Universal ; 
that the particular will must, therefore, contain 
in concrete, individual expression something of the 
Universal, and by virtue of so containing, it must 
have the sanction of the Universal in some quali- 
fied sense. In one aspect every individual desire, 
wish, need, may be regarded as simply and solely 
individual expressions of the particular will of and 
by itself; in the other, they are the expression of 
the Universal will imposed upon the particular 
will, yet expressed in it. For example, my hunger 
or thirst are instances of such expressions of the 
Universal will in and through the particular will. 
In one sense they are intensely mine, — nothing 
can be more insistent or particular in expression ; 
yet in the other, Universal sense they are beyond 
my control, — they but register the decrees of my 
inwrought nature, which I can change not one jot 
by any arbitrary act of will. They are concrete 
instances of the Universal will, very much as my 
falling out of a window is a concrete instance of 
the Universal will generalized and labeled the law 



50 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

of gravitation; both are utterly beyond my con- 
trol. 

It is, therefore, in this sense that the particular 
will is held not only without evil qualifications in 
its manifestations, but a positive expression in a 
concrete form of the Universal will. A further con- 
firmation of this is gathered when we find that these 
primitive desires of the particular will are held in 
common by all ; that if we examine many particular 
wills as known to us, we find peculiar, individual, 
even unique, manifestations, but after eliminating 
all these, we find invariably and in all wills these 
certain primitive appetites, tendencies, both phys- 
ical and mental; and we justly conclude that these, 
therefore, must have a common source or cause 
beyond and independent of their particular mani- 
festations in the concrete individual will. And 
that common cause must be the Universal will, the 
will of the whole. 

Not only do we infer this common source from the 
fact of the uniformity of their presence in all wills, 
but we are brought back by this different path to 
the conclusion previously reached, — namely, that 
they must be necessary and independent of any 
one particular will because always part and parcel 
of each and all particular wills. 

And the great rule of all good conduct must be 
such a rule as, if adopted by all, would suffer 
all wills to put the rule into practice without harm- 
ful consequences to or conflict with any. The 
rule, that is, must reconcile all wills so that they 



THE UNIVERSAL WILL 51 

can all act by it, which, of course, they could not 
do if the acting by it of one will should bring it 
into conflict with another will. 

Conflicting wills are always evidence of a bad 
will somewhere; some, possibly all, of the conflict- 
ing wills must be contrary to the Universal will. 

It has been said that our knowledge of the Uni- 
versal will must be derived from the particular, and 
it may well be asked how we can ascend from par- 
ticulars to a Universal. How is the Universal to 
get higher than the particular on which it is 
founded? How is Universality to be acquired 
by simply adding one particular to another, — a 
row of ciphers has no more value than a single 
nought? Why, for example, is the hunger or 
thirst, etc. — the manifestation of the particular 
will — to have a Universal sanction simply because 
it is independent of the particular will and is an 
invariable part of all particular wills? 

It has already been pointed out that here we are 
forced back upon principles that are of purely 
egoistic origin. The fundamental notion at the 
basis of our thinking the Universal is simply that 
sense of Unity which is elemental in both thinking 
and feeling. It is that primary impulse which 
compels us to consider everything that we have 
any knowledge of as in relation to every other 
thing. Every particular will stands in relation to 
every other particular will; we cannot conceive 
them as in reality separate and independent each 
of the other. And if in relation, then there must 



52 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

be a something which makes the relation possible, 
a basis or foundation in which that relation sub- 
sists ; and this is the idea or notion of the whole 
as in some way not only embracing every part, but 
as giving reason for and significance to each part. 
Hence again the necessity for an agreement, a 
harmony, of each part with the whole and with 
every other part, for unity of will, so that each 
particular will shall agree with the Universal will, 
— that is, the will of the whole ; and as a corollary 
to this, that each particular will agree with every 
other; for otherwise a disagreement of particular 
wills would be the destruction of the parts and so 
an impairing of the whole. 

And so it comes about that a rule for the Uni- 
versal will is deduced from the adding together of 
the particular wills (the wills of the parts), which, 
getting its positive contents, its concreteness, from 
the content of the particular wills, adds a sanction 
all its own and superior in authority to any par- 
ticular will, while expressed in terms of that con- 
tent and founded upon it, this sanction being 
derived from the egoistic necessity of considering 
all the parts as bound together in a whole. It 
might be said that the Universal will is for many 
purposes the particular will, shorn of its particu- 
larity and, as it were, universalized by the elimi- 
nation of its inharmonious features. Thus a 
standard of conduct is obtained, tentative in a 
measure, yet more or less satisfactory nevertheless, 
a sort of resultant produced by the two forces of 



THE UNIVERSAL WILL 53 

opposite tendencies, — the one force being the self- 
assertion of the particular will based on those 
necessary, externally imposed desires such as hun- 
ger and thirst and so on; and the other force the 
none the less externally imposed Egoistic feeling 
that the various particular wills must not conflict 
with each other, must make a harmonious whole, 
which is a vague yet perfectly true notion of the 
Universal will as constraining the harmony of all. 

From the preceding an important principle 
governing the relation of the Universal and par- 
ticular would seem to result, — namely, that the 
rights of the particular are always rights derived 
through and because of its being part of the Uni- 
versal. By itself and in itself apart, separate 
from the Universal, it has no rights. Whenever it 
has a right to its particularity, to be itself, to do 
or possess something, it is always because the do- 
ing or being or possessing is a doing or being 
something that has the Universal in it, is for the 
Universal and for its welfare. The particular, it 
has been remarked, is part of the Universal, has 
something of it in it, helps to make it up ; and so 
far it has the sanction of the Universal for its 
particularity, but only so far. This principle, 
firmly grasped, holds the key to many of the prac- 
tical problems of life, gives the " open sesame " to 
many closed doors. 

In one shape or another the principle has been 
set forth more or less definitely in varying phrase- 
ology by the profounder writers on law and gov- 



54 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

ernment. Jeremy Bentham gave it a popular ex- 
pression that has since stuck in the mouths of 
men, when he declared that the happiness of the 
greatest number must be the test and sanction of 
all laws as well as their true end and purpose. 

But no statement can overcome the difficulty 
which affects the principle, no matter in what 
terms we may formulate it. We seem to pursue a 
vicious circle. The particular has a right to be 
itself, and the right of the Universal — that is, of 
the Universal pro hac vice society — is made up of 
all these rights of the particular; without them 
the quasi Universal, society, would have no con- 
tent, no meaning. Yet society may call for con- 
cessions from the particular of these very rights ; 
may, indeed, take them entirely away in the name 
and by virtue of those rights which it seems to 
partially deny by its demands. Thus the life of 
the particular is demanded by society in the name 
and for the sake of the lives of all the rest when 
it sends its soldiers to battle, when it sends its 
murderers to the scaffold; likewise, the liberty of 
the particular is taken when it compels him to 
serve on a jury or sends him to jail; again, his 
property is taken when it taxes him ; and so on 
through all the catalog of curtailments of what 
we call natural rights, than which none can be 
supposed to be more fundamental, more sacred 
than life and liberty, but both of which are often 
taken in the name of society, of the Universal. 



THE UNIVERSAL WILL 55 

Apart from the Universal, by itself, away from 
society, from the whole, such a sacrifice of these 
rights of the particular would not be thought of. 

Considered by itself and in itself, the particu- 
lar's rights to life, liberty, and the like, are un- 
questioned, self-evident. At least so they seem 
until we reflect that all by itself such rights have 
no significance. In a vacuum, void of all but 
itself, of all relation to other particulars or to the 
whole, rights have no place ; a right always con- 
notes relations with others, with the Universal; it 
means that against something that opposes or de- 
nies, the particular is entitled to assert, to claim, 
to possess, to do. What meaning would a right 
of property have in a region denuded of men as 
against whom it is to be enjoyed; or what right 
is there in a liberty which is simply a freedom 
from all others, but with nothing with regard to 
which liberty would have value? Liberty to do 
nothing, to go nowhere, is an empty thing. So 
now we see the truth of the principle in a new and 
clearer light ; we see how it is that the rights of 
the particular are only rights through and because 
of the Universal; that not only are these rights 
derived from the Universal, but that apart from 
the Universal they are of no value, have no mean- 
ing. 

The truth is the two cannot be divided; their 
significance is only to be understood when taken 
together. The particular cannot realize its own 



56 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

particularity truly save as part of the whole, of 
the Universal ; and the Universal is without mean- 
ing save as it is expressed in the particular. 

The application of all this to practical affairs is 
not far to seek, and will be found most effective in 
solving some of the problems they present. At 
present, for example, there is much discussion over 
the right of women to vote; now it is very plain 
in the light of the principle that there is no such 
right either in men or women except as it affects 
the interests of the state, the Universal pro hac 
vice. It is a right which the particular derives 
through and because of the Universal. If it be 
conducive to good government, to the interests of 
the state, then the man or woman has a right to 
vote. It is a right like all other rights of the 
particular derived from the Universal — the state, 
in this instance — and must be so judged. It will 
vary according to the requirements and needs of 
different states, the quasi Universal, of which the 
particular may chance to form a part. 

In some states, some conditions, it may be for 
the good of the whole that certain individuals 
should vote, and such individuals then have that 
right; in others it may be exactly the opposite, 
and then there is no such right. Without explic- 
itly acknowledging the principle, we find all the 
arguments to turn very much on this ; and long 
essays are put forth, showing how much better or 
worse the state is governed where women vote or 
do not vote, as the case may be, which proves the 



THE UNIVERSAL WILL 57 

appreciation of the principle that the right to 
vote is a right that is derived from the whole; it 
is not a natural right, as we say in the familiar 
language of the street. Indeed we have now seen 
that there are no natural rights in the sense of 
rights independent of the Universal. Even that 
right of property sometimes styled sacred on ac- 
count of its fundamental character is now by some 
of the best jurists styled a social right; that is, 
the individualistic theory of property is aban- 
doned, and it is declared that the owner of prop- 
erty holds it through the state and for the good of 
the state ; when the good of the state requires it, 
his property ceases. It may be taken from him by 
the state, expropriated with or without compensa- 
tion, as again is best for the interests of the state. 
His ownership is for the good of all, for and be- 
cause of the Universal, represented by society; he 
has no natural right. So, as Von Ihering tells us 
("Law as a Means to an End," page 392), "is 
property made a practicable and feasible institu- 
tion ; without it property would become a curse to 
society." 

The right to life itself, which of all rights might 
be supposed to be the absolute, inalienable right of 
the particular to its particularity, ceases the very 
moment that it is not for the good of the whole, 
the Universal, society ; so of personal freedom, and 
the like natural, inalienable rights of the particu- 
lar. The life of the criminal is taken for the good 
of the whole, because his right to it, being derived 



58 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

from the whole, the Universal, ceases when it is 
for its benefit that it should cease; so the liberty 
of the criminal is likewise sacrificed; and the only 
admissible question in practice is whether it be for 
the good of the whole, of society, that this life or 
that liberty should be taken from the particular. 
It is here that so much of the false sentiment about 
criminals leads astray good, conscientious people, 
who, twisting askew the principle of the greatest 
good to the greatest number, make the question 
of punishment of the criminal to turn, not on the 
good of society, the whole, but on the good of the 
individual criminal; setting up the rights of the 
particular against the rights of the Universal, 
making the reformation of the criminal the chief 
point, and not the protection of society. 

So in many other practical questions of govern- 
ment and social well being, such as divorce, for ex- 
ample, where the effects on the rights of the 
particular are often allowed to distract the dis- 
cussion from the true point, which is the good of 
the whole. This wandering from the right path 
is the easier because we all recognize that the good 
of the whole is made up of the good of the parts, 
and so it becomes easy to make the wrong inference 
that it is the good of every part and not the good 
of all the parts that must govern, and to forget 
that the two are not the same. For some excep- 
tional persons no laws may be necessary; they 
require no restrictions, are better without them. 
But it is not a question of these exceptional per- 



THE UNIVERSAL WILL 59 

sons, but of the average person, that is involved 
when we speak of the good of the whole ; they make 
up the whole. Therefore by restrictive laws we 
take a certain amount of freedom from each par- 
ticular for the good of all, the good of the whole. 
All social questions must be studied in the light 
of this principle, that the rights of the particular 
are all derived through the Universal : Whether a 
liberal or very stringent divorce law, or no divorce 
law at all, is best, is to be decided, not by study- 
ing individual cases of hardship or the rights of 
any one particular, but the question is to be tested 
by its effect on the whole, on society at large, with 
no regard to individual cases save as they affect 
the whole. There is scarcely any limit to the ap- 
plication of the principle in practical matters. 
Thus in the domain of economic theory much is 
made of the suffering, the poverty, the crime, that 
the modern industrial system inflicts ; the rights, 
the good of the particular, seem to the unthinking 
sentimentalist to be utterly and wrongfully disre- 
garded. But these rights are derived from the 
Universal, and the real test is not " Does this sys- 
tem injure certain particulars and is it therefore 
wrong? " but " Is this system the best for the 
whole society, for the Universal? " or, to put it 
popularly, " Does it secure the happiness of the 
greatest number better than any other? " If so, 
the rights of the particular are not infringed, for 
their rights come through the Universal, through 
society, of which they are a part. 



60 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

This does not declare that no regard is to be 
had to the rights of the particular, to individual 
hardship inflicted by any economic system, but 
that they are not to be considered except in the 
light of the Universal, the whole ; and just as the 
right of the particular to life and liberty is only 
derived through and because of the Universal, and 
may therefore be taken away if for the good of the 
Universal, of society as a whole, so these lesser 
rights of the particular may be taken if for the 
good of the whole, the Universal. Thus the real 
question becomes with any government, with any 
society, not " Are there any individual instances 
of suffering in it ; are the rights of some particular 
infringed? " but always " Are the rights of all par- 
ticulars, — i.e., the rights of the majority, made as 
secure as possible? " 

Sometimes the rights of the particular are as- 
serted in such a way and to an extent that over- 
rides all rights derived by and through the whole, 
all rights of the Universal concretely expressed in 
society. We involuntarily think of Rousseau's 
" Rights of Man " ; of the French Revolution, 
which was a chaotic assertion of the rights of the 
particular as against the Universal. We may also 
recall the result of the struggle, and the reaction 
that brought back the rights of the particular to 
their true place as derived from and through the 
Universal. For even a revolution that in the name 
of the rights of the particular would annihilate 
the Universal, undo all knots of its tying, and 



THE UNIVERSAL WILL 61 

leave the particular independent, free of all rela- 
tions or obligations, only does so, in theory at 
least, by substituting for the assailed Universal 
[the society condemned at the moment] a new and 
higher Universal, a regenerated society, so to 
speak, — a brotherhood, a fraternity of man all 
over the world ; and the watchwords " Liberty," 
" Equality," " Fraternity " — which are, of course, 
abstractions, and like all abstractions smack of 
the Universal — while destroying the old Univer- 
sal, establish a new one embodied in those magic 
words. 

Indeed all these revolutions, as well as the less 
violent efforts of men to reach standards of con- 
duct, sets of rules for society, are in effect efforts 
after a formalization of the Universal will for 
practical, everyday purposes ; they are steps in 
the great process of civilization, as it is called, for 
civilization is a practical instance of the process 
of a partial universalizing of the particular will, 
the making of a quasi, more or less Universal will 
for practical living purposes. It is largely noth- 
ing more or less than the eliminating of the par- 
ticular and the adopting from the particular those 
elements of the particular will which, as imposed 
upon it and common to all, thus vindicate their 
claim to be erected into law, — that is, to a quasi 
Universal will for social ends. 

The Universal will thus worked out in its most 
developed form, we call law; in its earliest stages, 
general habits, manners, customs. And this law, 



62 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

again, is no more than the expression of or iden- 
tity of will which has been found to be possible for 
each particular will without infringement of the 
identity of any other particular will. This proc- 
ess as exhibited in history is one long struggle of 
will with will. Through conflicts, wars, bloodshed, 
battles, taking of cities and destruction of armies, 
men have slowly come to that harmony of the 
particular will with the Universal which is called a 
government of laws. Before such a result a long 
process of assimilation, slow and labored, of will 
with will must have taken place, until a Universal 
or harmonizing law was worked out which was 
recognized as a true Universal in so far as it recon- 
ciled all particular wills, acknowledging at the 
same time the underlying principle that every par- 
ticular possesses a right to some degree of recog- 
nition because each will has in it an element, and 
so is part, of the Universal will. For the Uni- 
versal will gets its content, its concreteness, from 
the particular will; it is the desires, wants, needs 
of the particular that give matter to the Universal, 
just as the Universal gives form, shape, and final 
purpose to the particular, and so makes a rule or 
law out of the chaos of the particular in its diverse 
and innumerable contents. 

And now we see emerging the canon of the Uni- 
versal in its relation to the particular, which is that 
all the content of the particular will is to be pre- 
served and retained in the Universal in so far as 
that is compatible with its being Universalized, — 



THE UNIVERSAL WILL 63 

compatible, that is, with its harmonizing with 
other particulars, and so with the Universal. The 
ideal system of law must be that which permits 
the greatest liberty and freedom of expression to 
the individual, consistent with the harmony of all 
individuals with each other and so with the whole. 
It is interesting and well worth observing what 
the limitations of this canon of the Universal are 
as exhibited in some societies. In American social 
life, for example, we become aware of the most 
extreme attempt to give the freest, least restricted 
expression to the particular will. And in so doing 
we find ourselves coming upon certain barriers that 
lie inherent in the very nature of the problem. 
Too free an exercise of the rights of each particu- 
lar will goes far to infringe and curtail the rights 
of other particular wills, so that the canon of their 
relations is transgressed; and it comes about thus 
that excessive freedom of the particular will re- 
sults in the very worst tyranny, the tyranny of the 
unregulated, eccentric trespassing of each particu- 
lar will upon every other particular will. In no 
country of the world, probably, is there more of 
this trespassing on the rights of the individual by 
the unrestricted, unregulated license given to every 
man to do and act as he pleases. The newspapers 
ruthlessly invade private life and attack private 
character ; personal rights and privileges are made 
little account of and given scanty protection, even 
by the courts, when transgressed by large and im- 
portant interests. Public opinion and sentiment 



64 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

— that vital spring of all true social law — make 
less of private rights to be let alone, to be unmo- 
lested by others (what may be called the passive 
rights) than of those rights to do and act which 
may be called the active rights. This is in direct 
disregard of the truth that the excessive exercise 
of the latter, which is commonly called " liberty," 
must result in restricting the equally important 
passive rights. My right to travel in an automo- 
bile sixty miles an hour trenches very materially 
on your right to enjoy a safe road, undisturbed 
by dust, unthreatened by danger. Your right to 
sell insurance, life, fire or marine, without license 
or supervision may trench upon my right to have 
a safe and trustworthy policy for my money. So 
of the exercise of many other natural rights, such 
as the right to administer medicine, give legal ad- 
vice, sail a ship, run a steam engine, perform a 
thousand and one acts in the performance of which 
the safety or health of others is involved. 

In all law, therefore, it is very plain from the 
illustrations just cited that there are two elements 
to be discerned, of which the law may be said to be 
the reconciliation. The first is the element of Uni- 
versality ; that is, that which insists on the har- 
monizing of all particular wills with each other 
and so with the Universal will. It concerns itself 
chiefly with the preservation of the whole ; this may 
be said to be the form of the law. The second is 
the element of the particular, that which gives play 
to the particular wishes, desires, appetites of the 



THE UNIVERSAL WILL 65 

individual ; this furnishes the content, the material 
or matter, to the law. It concerns itself chiefly 
with the preservation, as far as possible, of the 
particular will in all its particularity, for it must 
be always remembered that while conflict of wills 
is evil and a conflicting will is an evil will, it does 
not follow that mere individuality or particularity 
in itself makes a will conflicting. 

Here, then, we have in the process of civilization 
exhibited in the formalization of its laws a prac- 
tical example of an attempt to infer the Universal 
will from the particular in so far as such inference 
became necessary to and involved in the problem 
of how men might peaceably live together in human 
society, for all laws are arrived at by an elimina- 
tion of those elements of the particular will that 
are peculiar, eccentric, contradictory to the Uni- 
versal will — indicated as such by their conflicting 
with other individual wills — and the retaining and 
taking up of those elements that are common to 
all and necessary. There is always a suppression 
of a part of the particular will, although as law 
grows more refined there is, no doubt, a greater 
and greater effort to preserve by nice distinctions 
more and more of all the content of the particular 
will save that which is plainly conflicting. 

It is not, therefore, every peculiar and individual 
feature of the particular will which must be sup- 
pressed, but only such as are conflicting with other 
particular wills, and so with the Universal will. 
Indeed it is, as already mentioned, a true canon of 



66 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

the relations of the two that individuality of par- 
ticular will is to be preserved as much as possible. 
Nor does it invariably follow that a difference of 
one particular will conflicting with that of another 
necessarily makes it conflicting with the Universal 
will. There is no obligation laid upon it to avoid 
conflict with every other particular will except in 
so far as that other particular will expresses 
the Universal will ; nevertheless there is prima facie 
a presumption that such conflict with a particular 
will involves conflict with the Universal will, which 
is known by and through the innumerable particu- 
lar wills expressing it. 

How, then, a really conflicting difference of will 
is to be known becomes an important question. 
All particular wills are different, and have a right 
to be different, from each other; in that difference 
is contained their individual character, their self- 
ness. And so long as this difference does not 
trespass upon or resist the endeavors of some other 
will to be itself, there is no conflict. Or again, if 
the difference or conflict of will merely conflicts 
with the difference of some particular will, which 
difference is itself in conflict with the Universal 
will, then that difference of the first will does not 
conflict with the Universal will. It is only as 
expressing the Universal will in concrete shape 
that any particular will has the right to demand 
of another particular will that it shall not conflict. 

For while every will ought to be in harmony 



THE UNIVERSAL WILL 67 

with every other, and so with the whole, it is clear 
that to be in harmony with a will which is itself 
out of harmony with other wills would necessitate 
the harmonizing will becoming out of harmony with 
the whole or Universal will, made up and expressed 
by the other wills. It may be well asked then, 
how, amid so many and so different particular 
wills, is any standard or measure of the Universal 
will to be gained? How, out of the multitude of 
individual particular wills, can we distinguish the 
Universal which they must express, — indeed, of 
which they are the only expression known to us? 

This is not so impossible a task as it may at 
first seem. The average will of the majority of 
individual wills may be safely assumed to represent 
the Universal will at that particular moment. It 
is a standard or measure of the Universal will as- 
certained much as the mariner, looking upon the 
heaving ocean and noting its uneven surface, is yet 
perfectly assured that there is a true level above 
or below which it never goes but for the instant, 
and to which it returns with unfailing regularity. 
This level, by the use of proper instruments, he can 
ascertain exactly. So and in like manner it may 
be said that despite all the eccentricity of particu- 
lar wills, all the aberrations from the normal, it is 
perfectly feasible to find an average will of the ma- 
jority of men which may serve as a true expres- 
sion, a safe measure, of the Universal will expressed 
in and by them. Those wills which do not con- 



68 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

form to this measure may be condemned as con- 
flicting with the Universal will as expressed in this 
standard, and therefore as wrong. 

And so we find this the central, vital idea of all 
democracies, of all governments which are ruled 
by majorities. The will of the people — that is, 
of the ma j ority of adult and sane persons — is 
taken as the true law-giving power; for it, shorn 
of individual eccentricities, expressing only the 
traits, wishes, desires, common to all, represents 1 
that Universal will of which it is the concrete ex- 
pression. And so we say, with Sir Henry Cun- 
ningham, President of the Economic Section of 
the British Association, that the divine right of 
kings has been replaced by the divine right of ma- 
jorities; divine, rightly so called, because of its 
representing in concrete shape the Universal will. 
In this lay the truth of the popular saying " Vox 
populi, vox Dei ": the will of all individual men, 
united in common traits, eccentric and abnormal 
traits eliminated, stands for the voice of God, for 
they are, in this Universalized character, what God 
made them. 

The practical application of this principle, while 
perhaps difficult, is not impossible. What the av- 
erage will of the great majority of men is at any 
given period of history is not only possible of 
ascertainment ; it is, to the eyes of the philosoph- 
ical historian, written plainly in the records of 
the nation or tribe or race, for these records are 
the resultant of those various particular wills re- 



THE UNIVERSAL WILL 69 

duced to some sort of unity by the rough process 
of war and blood-letting. 

For we must assume, granting an all-powerful 
Universal will, that the great and the main cause 
of all happenings in the world of men, in the world 
of matter, in the Universe itself, in some way rep- 
resents the willing of that will. Its only contra- 
dictions must be mere temporary, incidental in- 
fringements, of no real consequence or significance. 
This means that the general progress of the world 
— considered in the large, over great spaces of 
time — must be the progress of the Universal will, 
must therefore be right in its results, and must be 
the true manifestation of that will; otherwise, we 
have to think an all-powerful Universal will which 
does not control all things, is not all-powerful, but 
is hindered and thwarted, and does not accomplish 
itself in the course of the ages, — in other words, 
is not an all-powerful will at all. 

By a proper study, therefore, of the course of 
the world of nature, of morals, of civilization, we 
must be able to know what that Universal will is. 
But in this study we have to discriminate carefully 
between the haphazard, the sporadic, the eccentric, 
and the average, the normal, the general, the Uni- 
versal. It is not the expression of individuals, 
nor even of great crowds, nor even of nations and 
races of men, that constitutes always a manifesta- 
tion of the Universal will ; yet again, looking back 
for centuries over many nations and races, we can 
discern something that is consistent, uniform, that 



70 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

has an identity throughout. We can see in retro- 
spect the martyrs and the despised and condemned 
of one century become the heroes, the recognized 
prophets, of the next, the Universal will thus 
marking its course through the ages. Thus we 
must not accept the cry. of even the majority of 
one century as the true expression of the Univer- 
sal; it is only time and the slow procession of 
events that shall finally reveal the Universal will 
through all these mutations ; so alone may the Uni- 
versal will be known. And its results are always 
right, just, true; to them we must conform in the 
end, for this will is the good will. 

It might then be asked, " Why trouble ourselves 
about the matter? " Browning has told us: 

" God's in his heaven ; All's right with the world." 

But how about ourselves? The world may be 
right and yet we may be at variance with that 
Tightness ; our variance will not eventually affect 
the results, but it may very seriously affect us ; 
we may be destroyed, lest by our persistence we 
destroy the harmony of created things. Whether 
we survive or perish, crushed out by the Universal 
will, depends on whether we are or are not har- 
monious with it. 

Again, the point may well be raised that the 
knowledge of the Universal will can be of little 
service to us as a guide to external conduct, since 
it is a knowledge to be arrived at only after the 



THE UNIVERSAL WILL 71 

event. It is a sort of ex post facto knowledge: 
when we see what is done we may know that it is 
right, yet — the truly important point to our- 
selves — we may not know the right while it is in 
the doing. 

To this two remarks apply ; first, that by a study 
of past civilization, transpired history, preceding 
developments in manners, morals, character 
through past ages, we may trace the trend and 
direction of the working of that Universal will, 
and so infer its future aims and purposes, much 
as the scientist may build up from a single bone the 
whole structure of a perished antediluvian animal, 
or a geologist, beholding some strata or vein of 
rock formation, may trace with almost absolute 
precision the hidden and still undiscovered course 
of it through the depths of the earth. Secondly, it 
is to be further noted that so long as the particular 
will on its internal side is in harmony with the 
Universal will, has the disposition to put itself in 
the posture of seeking the Universal will rather 
than its own particular will in the objects that 
present themselves for its action, a mere intellec- 
tual mistake, a misreading of the external signs of 
the Universal will, is not vital. If I seek to do the 
Universal will and err in some concrete instance, 
that error is not fatal to the harmony of my will 
with the Universal will on the internal side; and 
when my error discovers itself, I easily can rectify 
my act in that respect. The intellectual mistake 



72 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

in no wise affects the harmony of will, which de- 
pends on feeling, emotion, or the desire to be har- 
monious with the Universal. 

Thus far we have viewed the Universal will in its 
relation with the particular will as exhibited in the 
will of man, and we have sought to extract from 
the various presentations of the Universal will 
through the particular some idea or notion of that 
Universal will which we are only permitted to know 
in this fragmentary way. But there is a still 
larger sense in which we may contemplate that Uni- 
versal will. Its rule is not confined to man and 
his particular will, but extends over all things, 
the Universe of phenomena, of which man is but a 
small part. At least so we are, by that same com- 
pulsion of thought, compelled to think ; for we can 
no more think a Universal will for man and another 
different will for all the world besides man than we 
can think of two laws of gravitation, one for man 
and one for the rest of the world. This mental 
necessity need only be mentioned now to keep our 
vision of the subject clear and definite. 

We may not at first unite all these phenomena 
of man and nature under the dominion of a single, 
all-powerful Universal will. The earthquake, the 
lightning, the ebb and flow of the sea, the growth 
of plants, the planetary motions, the hunger and 
thirst of our own bodies, the compulsions of our 
thinking — to the untrained, undeveloped intelli- 
gence these may seem too diverse and the task ot 
so uniting them too great. This may remain for a 



THE UNIVERSAL WILL 73 

later development of our thinking, just as algebra, 
geometry, the calculus, long lay among the dor- 
mant compulsions of mathematical thought. Prim- 
itive man, we are told, put a separate will in every 
spring, in the wind, the ocean, the woods ; there was 
not a single natural object exerting power contrary 
to his own to which he did not attribute a separate 
will or personality. The ancient name of the 
Hebrew Jehovah himself (Elohim) was plural, al- 
though followed by a singular verb, showing the 
sense of the unity of the Universal in its earliest 
intellectual development, the struggling passage 
from a polytheistic to a monotheistic stage of the 
human understanding of the world. It interpreted 
these many Gods as merely different names for 
different aspects of that one Universal will. It 
was part of the struggle of the intellect from the 
various parts to the single whole, to unity which 
regarded all the differences of wills — flowing of 
tides, shining of sun, raging of wild beasts, strokes 
of lightning — as but different manifestations of 
the single Universal will ; each may have primitively 
been looked upon as Eloah (God) — that is, a 
part of God's power, — but all united (Eloahim — 
Gods) made up the whole God, the supreme Uni- 
versal will, of which each separate manifestation 
was but a part.* 

It remained for subsequent higher, although 
equally compulsory, development of thought to 

' *See Stanley's "History of the Jewish Church": "The 
Call of Abraham," page 25. Deuteronomy VI : 4. 



74 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

enable Moses to unite all these separate manifesta- 
tions into that great declaration — that achieve- 
ment, we might say — of Jewish religious thought : 
" The Lord our God is one Lord." 

And with this recognition of the Universal will 
governing all natural phenomena, went the further 
feeling or assurance that all such natural phe- 
nomena were right, that in this sense whatever was, 
was right. The ebb and flow of the tide, the 
motions of the heavenly bodies — what madman 
would ever dream of questioning their rightfulness ! 
Or perhaps it would be more accurate to assert 
that the idea of right and wrong did not emerge 
at this point, for right and wrong mean always 
a conflict of particular will with Universal will, 
and in the world of phenomena, excluding man, 
we cannot imagine such a thing. A Universal will, 
all-powerful, must control and over-rule all; no 
conflict with it is possible ; there is no power to con- 
flict in these subjects of its sway. The apparent 
conflicts of these are but the working out of that 
will. All these conflicts and destructions, disap- 
pearing stars, destructions of the lightning and the 
earthquake, we regard not as contradictions, but 
as right and proper expressions of that one al- 
mighty Universal will. What the purpose of that 
will may be, to what end it moves in solemn, silent, 
inexplicable majesty, we can only guess and 
wonder. 

Starting, then, with this idea that the whole is 
right and the Universal will governing the whole is 



THE UNIVERSAL WILL 75 

right, or rather with the idea that right and wrong 
have no application to these (as well might we ask 
as to the weight of a melody or the extension and 
size of a thought), we consider right and proper 
the other equally natural phenomena, — the com- 
pulsions of our appetites, passions, the laws of our 
thinking, — imposed upon us by that Universal 
will. These, being as independent of our control 
as the external phenomena, we instinctively recog- 
nize as phenomena to which the notions of right 
and wrong do not apply. It is only when we are 
confronted with this problem or situation — when 
an appetite, say your hunger (right and entitled 
to satisfaction) is opposed, conflicts, with another 
appetite, say my hunger (equally right and 
proper), that the idea of conflict arises and the 
necessity of some reconciliation of the two con- 
flicting rights dawns upon us. Thus conflict of 
wills and the wrong which it entails first appears, 
and we begin to wrestle from that moment with the 
problem of right and wrong, thus for the first time 
made real to us. It is only when we come to the 
human particular will that we thus are enabled to 
gather the essentials of the conception of right and 
wrong which lie entirely in the possibility of the 
conflict of wills, a possibility which is entirely out 
of the question in the external world where that 
Universal will is all-powerful, where harmony with 
it is not the result of coercion, but simply the bare 
fact that all creation is the expression of that will : 
there is no other will. 



76 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

Thus the question of right and wrong is seen in 
the large, not separate, independent of man's par- 
ticular will, for of course it is only in relation to 
man's will that right and wrong have the possi- 
bility of their existence, but yet in relation to all 
the rest of the Universe. It is seen how the Uni- 
versal will must govern and does govern not merely 
man and his acts — his is a small part physically 
of the Universe about him — but all things ; and 
the fair inference may be made that this Universal 
will, one and undivided, identical to our thinking, 
must pursue in the government of men a course 
and method uniform with that by which it rules 
the rest of the Universe; that it is no special will 
for man alone, that its government of him is but a 
part of its government of all. A study of its 
dealing with the rest of creation, therefore, must 
help us to an understanding of its dealing with him. 

But it may well be asked, if the Universal will be 
all-powerful, if it rules all, how any conflict of 
man's particular will with it becomes possible. 
The acts of his will, becoming part of the physical 
Universe, must be as much subject to that will as 
any other phenomena of the world of Nature. 
This, of course, is perfectly true ; man's acts, how- 
ever conflicting with the Universal will, must be 
ruled into subjection to that will, and while this 
may not take place at once (a violation of the laws 
of nature does not always bring an immediate 
punishment, any more than a violation of the moral 
law), yet eventually it does take place, and the 



THE UNIVERSAL WILL 77 

delay in the subjugation of the rebellious acts does 
not impeach the supreme authority of the Univer- 
sal will any more than the delay in the punishment 
of criminal acts by the authority of the state im- 
peaches its sovereignty and power over its subjects. 

But on the internal side of the will, that state of 
man's soul which precedes the outward acts of 
will, there is the possibility of a conflict with the 
Universal will which raises all the question of right 
and wrong, of sin and of misery, or virtue and 
bliss. Man's particular will may thus conflict with 
the Universal will, and although the external acts 
conflicting with the Universal will are by it sup- 
pressed or punished, still the internal particular 
will may remain conflicting with the Universal will 
and other particular wills expressing that Univer- 
sal will. The Universal will does not suppress 
that conflicting internal will, but the very fact that 
it is conflicting makes it a miserable and unhappy 
will, for the great law of all happiness of man is 
that his will, internal and external, shall be har- 
monious with the Universal will. Any other con- 
dition of will means misery. Thus is to be under- 
stood that identity of virtue and happiness already 
referred to. 

Again it may be asked, if conflicting will — that 
is, sin — is always misery, why should the con- 
flicting will ever arise ; why should any man volun- 
tarily seek misery? This question may best be 
answered by considering the condition of the inner 
particular will which is called happiness, and which 



78 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

involves a discussion of man's struggle for that 
most desirable state. 



HAPPINESS 

In the light of the preceding discussion, happi- 
ness defines itself as nothing more nor less than the 
result of harmony of will with will. In actual ex- 
perience such harmony is always a concrete, par- 
ticular instance, the harmony of the will with 
another and thus with the Universal, for harmony 
of the particular will with the Universal Will is 
an abstraction, an impossibility ; in reality as we 
know it, its harmony (constituting happiness) 
must always consist in harmony with this or that 
particular will or wills in which and through which 
it is in harmony with the Universal will of which 
these wills are the concrete expression. It is thus 
that the question answers itself how a conflicting 
will, which spells misery, should ever arise ; for it 
would seem that the struggle of all men would be 
for the happiness of the harmonious rather than 
the misery of the conflicting will. But there may 
be a harmony of will which for the moment may 
produce happiness, although such harmony be 
really conflicting with the Universal will and there- 
fore ultimately spell misery. 

It is from this circumstance of a temporary har- 
mony with some concrete will which is itself in 
conflict with the Universal will, that an apparent, 



HAPPINESS 79 

deceptive harmony of will with will may occur 
which is not a true harmony with the Universal 
and produces only a temporary happiness that is 
sure to turn to misery in the end, when that will is 
suppressed, ruled into harmony with the Universal 
will, for it must ever be borne in mind that the only 
happiness of man's internal state is harmony of 
will with the Universal will. All conflict of will 
is painful and productive of misery. 

But it may be asked, and would perforce be ad- 
mitted, that there is a species or kind of happiness 
that is the product of sensations ; the pleasure of 
the warm sunshine, of the cooling wind, of the 
bright color, the melodious sound, the toothsome 
viand, — these sensations give us a certain pleasure, 
and are we to ignore the happiness produced by 
them and say that all happiness is the product of 
harmony, unity of will with will? Undoubtedly 
this is the conventional idea, the popular notion 
that all pleasure or happiness is the product of 
these sensations. It is accepted without examina- 
tion that this is true ; but let us look at the reality 
as philosophy must, for, contrary to general opin- 
ion, it is philosophy that truly brings us in contact 
with reality, and hence its difficulty and strange- 
ness. 

Putting aside your ideas, look into your own 
consciousness as you recall it for the last twenty- 
four hours, let us say, and ask yourself, " How 
much happiness have I had that can be properly 
laid to pure sensations as its cause? Do tooth- 



80 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

some viands, warm sunshine, freedom from physical 
pain, constitute my happiness for those hours ? " 
I venture to say not. In the first place, none of 
these sensations continue long enough to cover any 
considerable period of the time ; they come and go 
continually, except perhaps the negative pleasure 
of freedom from pain, which consists rather in the 
absence of disagreeable sensations, a mere nega- 
tive condition necessary to, but not in itself con- 
stituting, positive happiness. But it will be found 
that the real happiness of the day has been made 
up of what is in popular language often styled 
one's state of mind ; that is, the mental attitude of 
myself to my surroundings, the behavior of my 
friends, the result of my plans and my work as 
expressed in events of my day. This is only 
another name for that unity of will which is the 
source of all true happiness in this world and the 
next. What this pleasure of unity of will is, as 
contrasted with the mere pleasures of sensations, 
may be understood by a closer study of that 
realization of the will already discussed, — that is, 
the carrying into execution of the will-ideas, the 
translating of the acting ideas of consciousness 
into deeds of the external world. This realiza- 
tion of the will is an admirable illustration, a con- 
crete example, of that wider condition of harmony 
of the particular will with the Universal will which 
constitutes in this world true happiness, of that 
virtue which it is and which gives promise and fore- 
taste of that eternal bliss to which all religion bids 



HAPPINESS 81 

us look forward in the next world. For as the 
pleasures, the happiness of the senses, fall away 
through the decay of our bodily faculties, this 
pleasure of harmony of will with will, particular 
will with Universal will, grows and waxes greater, 
so that we often find in old men of exceptional 
character a high degree of true happiness from 
that source when all bodily senses have failed them 
and ceased to yield their wonted tribute of physical 

joy. 

For this realization of the will depends for its 
motives, for the pleasure it undoubtedly yields, on 
this principle or truth of our internal states of 
consciousness ; namely, that the echoing back to us 
of our ideas, our feelings, our thoughts, plans, by 
the external always affords pleasure, gratification, 
satisfaction we may call it, in the instances where 
some acting idea has been in the consciousness and 
is afterwards translated into an external act, the 
satisfaction of the will : that is the peculiar, unique 
joy of having a unity, a correspondence of internal 
will and external deed. Philosophers have recog- 
nized the fact of this joy or satisfaction, and have 
in various ways sought to explain it, but it would 
seem wiser philosophy to accept it as it is given, 
tracing its various phases, its different operations 
under the various circumstances of life, but realiz- 
ing it as an ultimate, final, elemental truth that 
requires no explanation, or rather forbids it. 
There is no explanation of it any more than of 
the pleasure of the taste of honey in the mouth. 



82 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

Examine, if you will, the nerves of the tongue; 
trace the operation of the honey on them ; and yet 
there is left entirely untouched and unexplained 
why these particular affections of the nerves of 
taste by honey should produce that feeling in con- 
sciousness which we recognize as pleasure. The 
satisfaction experienced from the realization of 
the will is a different satisfaction from any satis- 
faction experienced by the senses and derived from 
sensations which by virtue of their agreeableness 
afford what we popularly term pleasure. It is a 
satisfaction which depends on the bringing about 
an identity between the acting idea and the ac- 
complished deed as it is afterwards perceived, 
rendered back to consciousness as a perception. 

Having once the acting idea, simple or complex 
— the idea of removing from a fire or the idea of 
some great discovery to be accomplished — there 
is at once a keen desire annexed to it to behold it 
executed, carried out into an accomplished act, 
because of the satisfaction of will that follows, a 
satisfaction which consists in that unity of indi- 
vidual will with Universal will that occurs when 
thought and act agree and coincide and so consti- 
tute a harmony, a unity (in these particulars at 
least) of the individual will with all other wills 
which is the highest happiness possible to man, for 
it is a step toward that unity of particular will with 
Universal will which has been described as the sum- 
mum bonwm. The reflection back to consciousness 
of these acting ideas in the accomplished deed of the 



HAPPINESS 83 

external world produces a unity of will of the in- 
ternal world with the external, of the individual 
particular will with the will of the Universal ex- 
pressed in these deeds, that is full of highest joy. 
Balboa discovering the Pacific Ocean ; Pasteur find- 
ing the germ of Anthrax ; Thackeray exclaiming 
over his Becky Sharp, " That was a stroke of 
genius ! " — we call these satisfactions of great 
achievements, the pleasure of success, triumph of 
accomplishing, and other varied terms that fail to 
set forth the essence of the matter, which consists 
in the bringing into consciousness the intense bliss 
of the soul that feels itself by these brought into 
unity of will with the Universal will expressed in 
that answering back to its thought, to its will, of 
that other Universal will ; and whose unity with its 
will is attested by the deed echoing back its 
thought. 

Psychologists have hinted and skirted about this 
great truth of the realization of the will and the 
harmony with the Universal will that thence results, 
and have pointed out the pleasure that follows a 
successful achievement of preconceived plans of 
action, whether these were the placing of a ball in 
a certain place — say in golf, football, billiards, 
and the like — the firing a shot into a target, 
or the bringing to completion some scheme of 
social, financial or religious import. Thus William 
James remarks * : "It follows that even when no 
pleasure is pursued by an act, the act itself may 

* " Psychology," Vol. II, page 556 et passim. 



84 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

be the pleasantest line of conduct when once the 
impulse has begun on account of the incidental 
pleasure which thus attends its successful achieve- 
ment and the pain which would come of inter- 
ruption." 

That is, a failure to realize the will — i. e. to 
carry its idea of an act into successful completion 
— is painful ; and in many cases, where the idea is 
a grand scheme of some sort which fails, whether 
it be a Protestant Reformation or a Conquest of 
England, it may cause such pain as to break the 
heart of the disappointed actor. 

In regard to the accomplishment of lesser plans, 
James again remarks * : "It is true that on 
special occasions (so complex is the human mind) 
the pleasure of achievement may itself become a 
pursued pleasure. . . . Take a football game or a 
fox hunt. . . . We reap the reward of our exer- 
tions in that pleasure of successful achievement 
which, far more than the dead fox or the goal-got 
ball, was the object we originally pursued." 

In other words, the real pleasure of all these may 
be called the realization of the will, and consists 
in that harmony of the internal with the external, 
of the will with the deed, the idea with the reality, 
that is a part and corollary of the great truth that 
unity of the particular will with the Universal will 
is the highest happiness, the summwn bonum of all 
happiness, which man is capable of. 

It is this great moving principle that impels a 
* " Psychology," Vol. II, page 557. 



HAPPINESS 85 

man to translate his thought, his idea, his will, into 
deed that he may en j oy that unity of individual will 
with Universal will which this in part affords and 
upon which, in the last analysis, all its pleasure 
depends. 

The great motive power, therefore, of all men is 
not the seeking of food, clothes, bodily satisfac- 
tions, but the seeking of that unity of will with the 
Universal will which is only partially attainable 
by these slight and imperfect harmonies of will 
with will which occur in the achievement of sports- 
men, philosophers, scientists, inventors, reformers, 
in the pursuit of their various undertakings. Or 
to come down to the smaller matters that fill our 
life every day, we may say that the carrying out of 
our plans, the fulfillment of our little expectations 
of life — the building a house, the making a bar- 
gain, the accomplishing of some small task — con- 
stitute the real happiness of our life; not the eat- 
ing of food, drinking of delicious liquids, nor any 
of the keen physical sensations to which we are so 
apt to refer when we think of pleasure. All these 
are so truly transitory that the man who has the 
most of them could probably not claim an hour a 
day as the sum total of their duration. All the 
rest of the day, if not filled with so keen a con- 
sciousness of pleasure, will be found to consist of 
more enduring satisfactions, dependent upon that 
unity of will with will — the agreement of friends ; 
the result, agreeable and consonant with our will, 
of some external happening; the weather; the 



86 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

actions of our fellows : these are what make up our 
continuous happiness or misery day after day, year 
after year. 

William James in his " Psychology " expresses 
in a concise way this notion of the pleasure or dis- 
pleasure that grows simply and solely from the 
correspondence or want of correspondence of will 
with will when he says : " We are chagrined if 
prevented from doing some quite unimportant act 
which would have given us no noticeable pleasure 
if done, merely because the prevention itself is dis- 
agreeable. 9 ' * The italics are mine. That is to 
say, the prevention is a defeat of the will, a turning 
back of the will upon itself without the satisfac- 
tion of the will received from expression in act 
whereby a harmony of internal will and external 
act is attained. There is a want of harmony thus 
between internal will and external act. The will 
finds no corresponding act echoing back itself. 
Here we are on the very edge of the true reason 
why the prevention of a willed act is disagreeable ; 
it is because the harmony of will with will is missed ; 
the echoing back of internal individual will by ex- 
ternal acts and objects which make up the Univer- 
sal will, is that harmony of will with will which 
makes the summum bonum of this life and of the 
next. Any prevention of the doing of an act 
planned out by the will destroys that harmony, 
causes want of harmony that is painful, — painful, 
of course, in various degrees, from the slight miss- 
* James' " Psychology," Vol. II, page 556. 



HAPPINESS 87 

ing of harmony that comes from a miscalculation 
of a boat or train to be caught, to the defeat and 
missing of some great reform to be accomplished. 
For it is not only in the great acts of life, the 
mighty plans of mice and men, but in the smaller 
as well, in their place and degree, that this har- 
mony of will with will plays its part. In the daily 
and hourly contacts with the external world, in 
innumerable and often trifling individual instances, 
this harmony is found or missed, for it is in these, 
too, that we are made to know the Universal will. 
What this joy of the unity of the particular 
will with the Universal will is, therefore, we may 
know in part and fragmentarially, for so only are 
we able to know the Universal will — by snatches, 
by bits and glimpses, from which we may infer its 
entirety imperfectly and conjecturally. The 
knowledge of the entirety of the Universal will is 
never vouchsafed ; perhaps we have not the capac- 
ity, under our limitations, of knowing it as it really 
is in all its vast comprehensiveness of Universe 
upon Universe, the infinitely little and the infinitely 
great. We know it in our relations with each item 
of our immediate environment, we know it and ex- 
perience it pulsing in the heart of our friend, our 
neighbor, or in the manifestations of nature, in the 
beating of the sea on the shore, the flying of the 
clouds before the wind; and we know the joy of 
unity and harmony with all these concrete expres- 
sions of it, calling such joys the joys of friendship, 
enjoyment of and communion with nature. 



88 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

And the great and final punishment of an evil 
will, — that is to say, a will not in harmony with 
the Universal will, — consists in this, that the 
realization of that will is defeated, prohibited by 
the Universal will; and the evil will never attains 
the full realization of itself, but suffers the unhap- 
piness of failure of realization which is the deepest 
unhappiness of the wicked if it does not mean the 
destruction of that will, — i. e. death itself, for the 
will as we interpret it is the individual; its death, 
or the cancellation of its acting ideas, is equivalent 
to the striking out of all the contents of its par- 
ticularity, making its individuality a mere blank, 
a nothing. In this sense are to be understood the 
pregnant words of Scripture, " The wages of sin 
is death." 



SIN AND DEATH 

And so we see how sin and death come to be 
identical at the last, for sin is the disagreement of 
the particular will with the Universal will, and, as 
we have seen, in the wide and all comprehending 
sense the particular will cannot exist except in 
harmony with the Universal will. We have seen 
that the all-powerful Universal will in all the physi- 
cal Universe rules all things and suppresses all 
contradictions of itself; and so we see that this 
same rule must apply to man himself; that his 
particular will, — although it has power of choos- 



GOODNESS AND HAPPINESS 89 

ing, of initiative, and may for the moment contra- 
dict and defy the Universal will, — yet finally must 
submit itself to the Universal ; that is, it must, like 
all the physical Universe, be ruled by that will, 
must either reconcile itself or suffer extinction. So 
we perceive how it is that sin means death, because 
sin means the opposition of particular will to the 
Universal will, and that necessitates the destruc- 
tion by the Universal of the particular will that is 
contradictory of itself and therefore sinful. 



THE IDENTITY OF GOODNESS AND 
HAPPINESS 

It may be interesting to remark some of the 
consequences that flow from this identity of virtue 
and its reward, happiness. That a good will must 
always be a happy will has already been asserted. 
For the particular will to will, to act, to govern 
itself, in harmony with the Universal will is both 
right conduct and that state of happiness which 
moralists tell us is only to be so obtained. 

" Be happy and you will be good " is, therefore, 
as sound a saying as its reverse and more common 
maxim, " Be good and you will be happy." For, 
properly interpreted, to be happy is in the last 
analysis to be in harmony with the Universal will, 
and this harmony with the Universal will is sure to 
produce conduct likewise in harmony with the Uni- 
versal will, and so good. 



90 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

This is not to declare that there can be no hap- 
piness of any sort apart from that harmony with 
the Universal will which is virtue. There is a false 
happiness, but even this will be found to consist in 
an apparent harmony with the Universal will; 
that is, a harmony with one or more of these par- 
ticular items, these individual instances, by which 
alone we know the Universal will (for without har- 
mony with some items of particular will, even this 
false happiness is impossible), but which particular 
wills are themselves out of harmony, contrary, to 
the true Universal will. Such happiness is that 
of wicked men who, agreeing in their contrariness 
to the Universal will, do gather a false happiness 
from this agreement, this harmony of wills contrary 
to the Universal will. Superficially it might seem 
their happiness exceeds that of the particular will 
which, while truly harmonious with the Universal 
will, is yet in conflict with other particular wills 
contrary to the Universal will. 

These temporary harmonies or conflicts of par- 
ticular will with other particular wills constitute 
all the moral difficulties of the world and lead to 
all those apparent contradictions in which we see 
the good will for a time unhappy, the evil will ap- 
parently happy. It is by these apparent har- 
monies, this false happiness, that the particular 
will, always seeking happiness, is led into conflict 
with the Universal will, and so to that misery 
which otherwise it would never of itself seek, for 
the identy of virtue and its reward is no ideal 






GOODNESS AND HAPPINESS 91 

theory: it gives us a practical solution of many 
problems of everyday life with all the ease of a true 
key. At the very outset it strikes down one of the 
most elusive and all-persuasive fallacies, a fallacy 
that lurks in unexpected nooks and crannies of 
our thinking and has to be dragged by main force 
into the light of day before it is recognized for 
what it really is. This is the popular fallacy 
which holds that goodness and happiness are ex- 
ternal, that the one consists in doing and the other 
in possessing something. It is oft recurring, and 
continually crying out for the repetition of the 
threadbare truism that man's virtue and happiness 
consist in what he is, not in what he does or what 
he has. This strikes down the charitable gifts of 
an evil will as ethically worthless, makes nothing 
of the happiness gained by the possessing of things 
apart from that harmony of will with the Universal 
will which has just been declared the only and sole 
definition of true and real happiness. Doing good 
by a man of evil will is nothing, just as getting 
happiness by the getting of some external posses- 
sion is nothing. 

In like manner and with equal ease this identity 
of the good will with happiness explains that prob- 
lem of the theologians — the existence of evil and 
the necessity therefor; for granted once that a 
good will is itself the reward of virtue as well as the 
cause of that reward, and we see that the existence 
of the particular will thus becomes an essential 
part of all happiness, and, further, that in this 



93 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

existence of the particular will necessarily lies 
latent also the existence of evil, for a will whose 
essence is its self-determining nature, its power to 
be good or evil, to agree or disagree with the Uni- 
versal will, would be no will if it lost that power 
and could not, if it pleased, be evil as well as good. 
That is to say, the possibility of evil is the neces- 
sary consequence of the possibility of good; both 
lie dormant in the nature of the will. Evil is thus 
nothing more nor less than the exercise by the par- 
ticular will of its self-determining power in a way 
contrary to and against the Universal will. Evil 
is not something sui generis, something by itself, 
but simply a wrong relation, a wrong state of the 
particular will with regard to the Universal will. 

Nor does the fact that the continuous contradic- 
tion of the Universal will by the particular will 
spells ultimate destruction for the particular in- 
validate this conclusion. The Universal will does 
not permit the particular will to oppose it except 
under the penalty of its final destruction, yet it 
does not deny to it the power to oppose and to so 
destroy itself. Its own destruction is thus as much 
the result of its free choice to oppose as its happi- 
ness is the result of its free choice to agree with the 
Universal will. 

It follows that much of the difficulty of the theo- 
logians and the metaphysicians over the existence 
of evil disappears. It is plain now how it happens 
that an all-powerful Universal will permits the ex- 
istence of evil, for its existence is but the conse- 



GOODNESS AND HAPPINESS 93 

quence of the existence of the particular will itself 
as a will, with its power of willing to agree or dis- 
agree with the Universal will. The possibility of 
good and of happiness is inextricably bound up 
with the possibility of evil and of misery. A par- 
ticular will, to be a will, must have self-determining 
power, — i. e. the power to be harmonious or dis- 
cordant with the Universal will, the power to be 
evil as well as good, to be miserable as well as 
happy ; otherwise, it would not be a will. It must 
be suffered to be itself if it is to be a will in the true 
sense of the word; to compel it to be harmonious 
with the Universal will by the coercion of a supe- 
rior power, would make it not a good will but no 
will at all, by robbing it of that self-determining 
power which alone makes it a will. In order to be 
a good will, it must have power to be an evil will ; 
to be happy, it must have the power to be miser- 
able : the self-determining power is an essential ele- 
ment of both states. A harmony of the particular 
will with the Universal which is not self-determined, 
the result of a free volition, is not virtue, nor is it 
productive of happiness, the reward of virtue, for 
such a harmony would be a coerced, forced har- 
mony which is no harmony at all. Nothing short 
of hell itself could probably be more miserable than 
a particular will compelled against its own volition 
by a superior power to be harmonious with a Uni- 
versal will. Such may be the condition of con- 
demned devils, forever rebelling against a will they 
loathe, yet to which they are forced to yield them- 



94 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

selves in a servile submission that in effect annihi- 
lates their wills as wills by taking away all power 
of self-determination. In short, such a condition 
is in effect the destruction of the particular will ; it 
is death, for sin and death are essentially like good- 
ness and happiness, different aspects of the same 
thing. 

This identity also disposes of a class of moral 
problems which have given rise to numerous and 
endless ingenious arguments, but at whose root lies 
the same essential fallacy that something may be 
good or bad irrespective of the will ; the contradic- 
tion of Kant's maxim that there is nothing good — 
or ill, he might have added — but a good or an evil 
will. No thing, no material substance, can have 
moral significance, or permanent pleasure or pain 
producing effects, apart from the will, for it is now 
apparent that there is no good end, no good thing, 
possible in all the world of action or of things but 
the perfect harmony of will with will, particular 
will with particular will and with Universal will. 
The idea of obtaining any such good in violation 
of that harmony is an intellectual delusion, another 
of the many nooks and crannies of thinking in 
which lurks the fallacy that happiness, the good, 
is an external something to be got or lost by get- 
ting or avoiding some external thing. 

In truth, all goods or evils, save a good or evil 
will, are relative, mediate, depending always on 
something else, some other further thing for the 
reason, the justification of their moral significance, 



GOODNESS AND HAPPINESS 95 

their goodness or their badness. A good will alone 
is a good in itself, complete, having reference to no 
other, further good, an end in and for itself, ask- 
ing nothing more, self- justifying, looking for 
nothing beyond itself; so we recognize and dis- 
tinguish and know it for what it is, the final 
good. 

To another somewhat different problem, grow- 
ing, however, out of the same recurrent fallacy, 
this identity brings the only satisfactory solution. 
The difficulty regarding prayer and the answers 
to it is a very real and, if considered otherwise than 
in the light of this identity, an insuperable one. 
For how can the government of the Universe, the 
Universal will, be placed in subordination to any 
particular will that may see fit to pray for some 
material thing not in harmony with the Universal 
will? And if this cannot be, how, then, are 
prayers to be answered? 

But now it is evident that prayer is one of the 
great instruments for bringing the particular will 
into harmony with the Universal will. The true 
good of all prayer is harmony of will. " Thy will 
be done " is the epitome of all prayer. It ex- 
presses the ego's desire for that good of all goods, 
a good will ; i. e., unity of will with the Universal 
will. It is one of the methods of universalizing the 
particular will. How this is accomplished is of no 
importance; whether the particular will modifies 
the Universal by getting its particular desire, its 
asked-f or material thing ; or whether it gets it not. 



96 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

but yields it up a willing sacrifice to the Universal 
will, matters not at all, only provided harmony is 
established between the two. 

In the function of thus unifying the will of the 
individual with the Universal will we see the true 
office of prayer. It obtains for us, not what we 
ask in the way of external things ; but its exercise, 
properly made, brings our will into that accord 
with the Universal will which constitutes for the 
ego the highest happiness. And this it attains, 
not by impressing the individual will on the exter- 
nal world, not even by a deliberate copying of the 
Universal will, but by a making of the Universal 
will its own in truth as though the Universal will 
were the spontaneous particular will, free and un- 
coerced. And it operates by virtue of that elemen- 
tal psychological principle that the very attempt 
to formulate, to give expression in consciousness to 
some mental condition, tends to produce it. If I 
pray sincerely " Thy will be done " generally, or 
particularly that I may forgive my enemies, that I 
may feel love for others, that I may be content with 
my lot, for any state of mind harmonious with the 
Universal will, that very act tends to create, to 
bring about, the result I ask. And so the prayer 
fulfills itself wherever it concerns itself with its 
legitimate objects, internal conditions; except as 
related to these, material goods are not the proper 
objects of prayer. It may be lawful and proper 
for me to express my own particular will with re- 
gard to the want of material goods ; " Give us this 



GOODNESS AND HAPPINESS 97 

day our daily bread " is certainly one of the clauses 
of the Lord's Prayer, but it is the only one relat- 
ing to material good ; all the rest are concerned 
with spiritual conditions — forgiveness of tres- 
passes, the prevalence of God's will on earth as in 
heaven, freedom from temptation — and this soli- 
tary petition for daily bread is one expressing not 
so much an arbitrary desire of the particular will 
for a material satisfaction, as for the answering 
of that demand for bodily sustenance without 
which it were impossible to exist on the earth, to 
be a will at all. It is only a petition for life, 
existence as a will under those material conditions 
in which it finds itself placed, and under which 
alone it can exist as it is. But the expression in 
prayer of the particular will in regard to material 
things, the getting or the not-getting — the escap- 
ing — of something, must always be allowable as 
in the clause just cited where the material thing 
is really part of the particular will and so neces- 
sary to its expression, making up its particularity, 
so to speak, as a will distinct from other particular 
wills, but always with the idea of such will coming 
to be universalized, made one with the Universal 
will, and its particularity, expressed in this desire 
for some material thing, completely eliminated and 
the material thing stricken out in the process of 
Universalization as of no consequence or signifi- 
cance. The getting or not getting the material 
thing must become a matter of utter indifference; 
otherwise, the particular will, instead of becoming 



98 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

universalized by prayer, would put itself in the 
position of particularizing the Universal will, at- 
tempting to coerce the Universal will into agree- 
ment with itself. 

In so far, therefore, as individual will involves 
in its expression the desire or need of some ma- 
terial good, it is legitimate for such desire to be 
expressed in prayer, since that desire for that 
material good is an expression of the individuality 
of that particular will ; but it must be an expression 
with no expectation that the desire, as respects 
that specified good, is to be gratified. Its expres- 
sion must be much after the manner of a confiden- 
tial outpouring of hopes, fears, desires, needs — 
in short of our self and our heart — to a sympa- 
thizing friend, with no idea that he will give things 
to us, but simply that he may know and become 
one with us, a sharer of our inner self and so of 
the wishes that make up that self. 



THE RECONCILIATION OF WILLS 
I. E., THE STRUGGLE FOR HAPPINESS 

Happiness or misery is the internal condition of 
the will, of which conduct is its external expres- 
sion ; and here we find the same struggle, the same 
effort to reconcile particular will with Universal 
will, that we observed in the external world of con- 
duct, only that now the struggle is one of internal 
feeling, — the endeavor of the particular will to ob- 



THE STRUGGLE FOR HAPPINESS 99 

tain the satisfaction that accompanies the asser- 
tion of its own appetites and desires, its identity, 
as against the appetites and desires, the identity, 
of all other wills, and restraining this and limiting 
it, that opposing tendency, that other feeling, that 
insists on harmony and unity with all other wills 
as a condition of its own internal state of happi- 
ness. This latter acts as a constant check upon 
the former, the unbridled satisfaction of egoistic 
appetites. 

In short, every man is torn asunder by two op- 
posing forces, two tendencies that contend for 
mastery in the external world; or rather, this in- 
ternal contention is the forerunner of the latter. 
Each man is, to use the conventional expression, 
selfish, — that is, full of his own particularity, his 
desires, his wants ; he is urged irresistibly on this 
side to do, to get, to assert for himself as against 
all the world — the Universe and all its individual 
parts. Yet at the selfsame moment an equally 
irresistible instinct or sense of unity compels him 
to strive for unity, harmony, with that very world 
which the first instinct of particularity urges him 
to oppose by an assertion of his own will. This 
latter seems wholly, hopelessly, contradictory of 
the former tendency. In the very selfishness of his 
particularity, the satisfying of his own desires, the 
assertion of his own particularity as against the 
Universe, lurk the seeds of pain and discomfort 
when such particularity carried out into conduct 
brings him into conflict with other particular wills, 



100 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

other individualities, and so into violation of the 
law of unity, of harmony with the Universal. 

The assertion of desires, thoughts, and feelings 
of the particular will — no matter how insistent 
and apparently in the interest of the happiness of 
the particular will — results at once in misery when 
they come into conflict with the desires, thoughts, 
and feelings of another particular will. I behold, 
for example, another man achieving some worthy 
deed, no matter what, and my feeling is not in har- 
mony with his ; I have no sympathy, no pride, in 
his deed, but a conflicting, inharmonious feeling 
of jealousy, envy, a desire to rob him of it, to 
grudge him the credit of it. I have no love or 
sympathy with him, and therefore I do not share 
his feeling of gratulation over it. Here is a true 
conflict of internal wills, a difference of wills, and 
with that conflict — following fast and inevitably 
upon it, part of it, indeed — is the penalty, its 
punishment. Unhappiness fills my consciousness 
at his success, an unhappiness which is caused by 
the want of harmony, the conflict of our wills, or 
rather that conflict is itself unhappiness. Instead 
of sharing his feeling of satisfaction at his accom- 
plishment — a harmony of will with will — I have 
the opposite feeling of dissatisfaction, of grudging 
him it, depreciating it — a conflict of will with 
will ; and in like manner, should he learn my feel- 
ing, there may also come to him conflicting feel- 
ing, which may make him unhappy in his turn. 
Ignorant of my feeling, uninformed of it, there 



THE STRUGGLE FOR HAPPINESS 101 

exists no conflicting feeling in his will until he 
becomes aware of my feeling; and then if his own 
will is truly harmonious with the Universal will, it 
does not harbor conflicting feeling with my will, but 
suppresses it, and so, leaving me miserable with 
conflicting will, it preserves happiness for itself by 
avoiding conflicting feeling. 

If, on the other hand, I look with sympathy on 
the deed of the other man, rejoice in it as if it were 
my own, feel proud of it as he does, I shall then 
share his feelings, the content of his will is the 
content of my own ; my will is not conflicting, but 
harmonious. My reward, happiness, follows apace, 
for that harmony of will with will is itself happi- 
ness, just as the conflict, popularly and variously 
styled jealousy, envy, depreciation, was misery. 
In other words, and adopting popular language, 
the pathway to true unity of will is love and sym- 
pathy. These are the keys by which I may unlock 
the treasures of the Universe, its true and lasting 
treasures; that is, its spiritual, eternal joys thus 
become mine. I make myself one with all; the 
world is mine in the highest and best sense, in its 
reality. All its achievements are my possession: 
I sing the songs of Mozart, think the thoughts of 
Bacon, write the hymns of Homer; I paint the 
Madonnas of Raphael; I shape the marble of 
Phidias or Praxiteles. The heroic triumph of 
Luther, the discoveries of Copernicus, the courage 
of Leonidas, are mine; I feel the devotion of the 
martyrs, the intrepidity of heroes, the love and joy 



102 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

in beauty of artists. There is nothing good, or 
fine, or truly and really a joy, in all the world that 
I may not lay hands on, appropriate to myself; 
they are all mine through love and sympathy, for 
these are the paths to unity of will ; these bring the 
joy of the world to those who will accept. 

And in the lesser ways of life, the affairs of 
every day and hour, among my neighbors and 
friends, my family, my city, my country, every joy 
of these is in like manner my joy. Not a man does 
a noble act or generous deed but it is mine; not 
one bears affliction manfully, suffers patiently, but 
I have my part in it. The world is mine indeed 
when I have this unity of will ; not that in point of 
ability or of power I have what these great folks 
possess, but that in point of feeling, according to 
my power and capacity, as far as I can I share 
their emotions and have their enjoyment of their 
achievements. 

On the other hand, lacking this unity of will, 
every one of these fine and glorious works of art, 
deeds of heroism, achievements of skill, becomes a 
misery. I suffer when I should enjoy; for envy, 
jealousy, — in short, disunity of will, — robs me of 
my lawful share, my property in these world joys. 
There is no truer exclamation of a full heart than 
the splendidly philosophical words, " I love and 
the world is mine ! " — no truer saying than the 
Buddhistic expression of the opposite truth: 
" Hate is hell." For this is part of the Universal- 
izing of the particular will, the beginning on earth 



THE STRUGGLE FOR HAPPINESS 103 

of what is to be completed in heaven. It is thus 
that the most selfish is forced, in the interests of 
his very selfishness, to set bounds to his selfishness ; 
for with a true intinct he learns that only so can 
his own joy attain its rightful proportions; and so 
he stretches forth his hand to the joys of others. 
For his own satisfaction every man is compelled to 
seek reconciliation of his own particular will with 
that will of the whole making itself known to him 
in these various concrete expressions of pictures, 
statues, melodies, poems, deeds, achievements of 
scientist, philosopher, or investigator, to the small- 
est act of everyday life. Even in that fierce com- 
petition of will with will which we call business, the 
most flagrant assertor of his own particularity 
seeks to justify himself by showing that his self- 
assertion is for the good of the whole; to argue 
that the crushing out of the few, the weak, the 
unfit, is for the benefit of the many. So every 
selfish fellow defends his selfishness by reference to 
that law of unity, of harmony of will with the Uni- 
versal, which he violates, but by virtue of his own 
internal constitution finds it impossible to ignore. 
He strives to bring himself and his particularity 
into relation with the whole, to feel himself one with 
it, part of it and possessing proper definite rela- 
tions with it. 

Forced at one and the same time into particu- 
larity by these wants, desires, that constitute his 
particular will, make him what he is, a human unit, 
an individual by and for himself, — he instinctively 



104 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

rebels at the isolation, separation, and division 
from the great whole that the assertion of these 
wants and desires compels in him. He desires 
to assert his particular will, to be himself, but he 
also desires to be in harmony with the Universal 
will. He refuses to be shut in upon his own nar- 
row self; he insists, while still himself, upon being 
something more, a self with universal ties and re- 
lations adjusted to the great whole. He must 
share with and be shared by others, all his fellows, 
everywhere ; and in proportion to the completeness 
of this sharing will be his happiness. 

The very assertion of his own particularity in 
so far as it separates and opposes the Universal 
will, the whole, makes for unhappiness, and he in- 
stinctively puts forth his hand for a remedy, a 
cure, for something that shall restore him to his 
place as part of the whole. Two great instru- 
ments of reconciliation present themselves, two 
avenues of escape — art and religion ; art as the 
great human bond of expression, of sympathy and 
communion with all other men, that shall bridge 
for him the gulf between his particular and the 
Universal, that shall convey his feelings to others 
and bring back their sympathy to him, that shall 
unite all in feelings common to each and every 
particular one. Art is the less conscious, the in- 
stinctive escape which the individual seizes natu- 
rally and without deliberation ; it is the cry of the 
child in the dark with no language but a cry ; it is 
the suffering or enjoying individual calling for 



THE STRUGGLE FOR HAPPINESS 105 

sympathy from his fellows ; it is the search for com- 
munion of feeling with others, the striving for some 
common channel for the expression of feeling, and 
so, by and through such channel, for harmony with 
all men and — so far as humanity goes to consti- 
tute the Universe — for harmony with the Uni- 
verse and its Universal will. But humanity in its 
totality is only a part of the whole, of the Univer- 
sal, and the particular will cannot rest satisfied, 
therefore, with art. Religion of some kind is re- 
quired to wholly reconcile the individual, not only 
with other individuals, but with the whole. Hav- 
ing come into some sort of harmony, of unity of 
feeling, with the Universal under this instinctive, 
impulsive, tendency to foregather with his fellows 
by means of artistic expression, much as sheep 
huddle together in a storm for the comfort of fel- 
lowship, there still remains for him the further de- 
sire to be in harmony with all, with the whole. 
The escape from his particularity is still but par- 
tial; he is now, by means of art, one in the great 
community of the whole human race, — their feel- 
ings are more or less his ; but he is still left with 
his fellows as only a part of the real whole. He 
must, to truly reach the Universal will, find some- 
thing that will include these, unite and give them 
end, purpose, meaning; that will co-ordinate them 
into an organized, reasoned unity. Men, no mat- 
ter how harmonious and united among themselves, 
are still not the whole ; they still are only a union 
of many particulars which can never be a true Uni- 



106 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

yersal. There must be something else necessarily 
superior to them, beyond and above them, for it 
must unite and give true reconciliation to the par- 
ticular with the Universal. The satisfaction of 
human intercourse, sympathy, community of feel- 
ing with others, is still only a partial satisfaction 
of the desire of* harmony with the Universal. It is 
a satisfaction that takes a man out of his par- 
ticularity, and so partially relieves that burden of 
separation that pesters the particular and indi- 
vidual, but it falls short of a complete satisfaction 
of his longing for unity with the Universal, for it 
puts him in relation with the Universal only par- 
tially ; it fails to give final purpose and meaning to 
that relation. To feel himself one with others, his 
fellowmen, is a deep pleasure and a long step on- 
ward toward the Universal ; but his intellectual and 
spiritual craving remains unsatisfied in this, that 
his fellowmen, like himself, are all themselves par- 
ticulars and have no more sanction for themselves 
in their particularity than he has. To be in har- 
monious relation, community of feeling, with them, 
while evidently right and part of his reconcilia- 
tion with the Universal, fails to afford any final 
answer to his reason, which asks : " How and why, 
to what end, are we all here; whither do we go; 
whence have we come ; what are we in relation to 
the whole of which we, all of us, are plainly but a 
part? What is the final purpose, the real mean- 
ing, of ourselves, which purpose and meaning must 
be in connection with that whole? " This, perhaps, 



THE STRUGGLE FOR HAPPINESS 107 

is an intellectual difficulty primarily, but it carries 
with it secondarily a feeling of dissatisfaction, a 
divine discontent, until it is satisfied. There is 
connected with it a strong desire for its answer that 
causes unhappiness until satisfied by some explana- 
tion of the relation of the particular to the whole, 
the Universal. 

Here we have the fundamental basis of religion 
in the wide sense, for it is religion that seeks to 
tie the particular, the part, into 1 the whole, the Uni- 
versal. In the history of man the two have ever 
been closely allied. Religion usually precedes, his- 
torically, conscious art. We know that the first 
great works of Greek art were all the handmaids 
of religion — the temples, and their statues and 
bas-reliefs, its outward symbol; the choruses (the 
beginnings of the drama), the expression of the 
internal feelings of thanks and joy to the gods for 
victory in battle. 

By these two methods, art and religion, there- 
fore, man seeks to retain his particularity, assert 
and preserve his individuality, and yet avoid and 
escape that separation, that opposition, which re- 
volts his instinct and impulse toward harmony and 
unity with all, but which separation and opposition 
are yet the legitimate effects of his particularity if 
carried to its logical extreme. Thus he reconciles 
the particular and the Universal will, and gains 
that unity of feeling which is essential to the in- 
ternal condition we call happiness. 



108 THE WILL IN ETHICS 



ART 

To the casual passerby in our streets there can 
be no more suggestive spectacle than on some rainy 
evening to behold, in the early dusk, that dull, inert 
line of humanity stretching its bedraggled length 
at the theater door. There they stand, poor 
wretches, patiently, dumbly, waiting. " For 
what ? " you ask. " What awaits them behind those 
somber portals that they should thus stand in the 
rain, their last coppers, perhaps, in their hands to 
pay the meager price of admission? " One would 
think a cup of coffee, a piece of bread, a patch on 
those ragged clothes, would be a more pressing 
need. But no ; so strong is their spiritual longing 
for what the theater affords in more or less degree 
that they choose it in preference to physical 
comfort. 

What, then, is it the theater, however degraded, 
gives these hungry souls? Is it not a lifting of 
them out of their particularity, a granting them 
the sharing of the life of feeling beyond themselves 
and so into closer touch with the Universal? What 
matters if it be but the poorest melodrama, filled 
with false sentiment, unnatural characterization, 
absurd dramatic action; be it never so poor a 
transition into the life of others, it yet is a transi- 
tion, a passing out of one self into others, and by 
virtue of that alone possessing something of the 
Universal; for how else is the Universal to be 



ART 109 

gained in feeling? How am I to go out of myself, 
cast out my own particularity — made up of my 
own selfish appetites, passions, wants, thoughts — 
save by bringing into my soul the appetites, pas- 
sions, wants, feelings, of others? For so alone can 
sympathy with them be born. And this the theater 
gives these poor restricted lives. It says to them: 
" Come here. Be a king, a noble, a hero ; feel the 
devotion of the mother, the heroism of the soldier; 
know the unhappiness of the evil; rejoice in the 
goodness of the good. In short, come into your 
inheritance, your birthright of the Universal; be 
part of it by sharing all these feelings of others." 

It is not a conscious seeking of an escape from 
particularity, from the narrow selfishness that 
shuts each man into the prison house of his own 
desires and feelings ; it is rather the instinctive 
seeking of the pleasure and the freedom that comes 
with the sharing of the lives and the sympathy with 
the feeling of others. Thus the man gets re- 
leased from his own particularity, gets a dim fore- 
taste of the great Universal feelings, and loses 
himself in his sense of the Universal. This is the 
human side of the Universal, the unity of man with 
man in feeling, in understanding of each other. 

A great philosopher,* quoting Guyon, has well 
said : " Art lifts man from his personal life into 
the Universal life by means not only of participa- 
tion in the same ideas and beliefs, but also by 
means of similarity in feeling." It remained for 

* Tolstoi's "What is Art?" 



110 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

this same philosopher to expound the true theory 
of art, to give it its true philosophical definition, 
for he saw and announced, with fine discrimination, 
that art is no more than the means adopted for 
conveying feeling from one man to another. It is 
the great channel for communicating feeling be- 
tween all men. It is that activity which, by ex- 
ternal expression of one sort or another, — by 
sound, color, line, written word or acted thought, 
by music, painting, sculpture, poetry, prose, 
theatrical representations, — seeks to make the feel- 
ings of one man the property or gift of another. 
It is thus a great bond between men, making for a 
common brotherhood of all by making all sharers 
of the same feelings, making a thousand hearts 
beat as one. So intimate is the communion of feel- 
ing thus brought about that, as Tolstoi has elo- 
quently said, " the receiver of a true artistic im- 
pression is so united to the artist that he feels as 
if the work were his own and not some one else's — : 
as if what it expresses were just what he had long 
been wishing to express. A real work of art 
destroys in the consciousness of the receiver the 
separation between himself and the artist ; nor that 
alone, but also between himself and all whose minds 
receive this work of art. In this freeing of our 
personality from its separation and isolation in 
this uniting of it with others, lies the chief charac- 
teristic and the great attractive force of art." * 
Tolstoi goes on to explain that where one soul 
* Tolstoi's "What is Art?" 1899, page 133. 



ART 111 

catches from another a condition of soul, an emo- 
tion — he means just what he have called harmony 
of will with will — then the work of art is complete. 
The degree of completeness with which this trans- 
fer of feeling is effected measures the excellence of 
the work of art. " The stronger the infection (so 
he styles it) the better the art," putting aside for 
the moment the question of the kind of feeling 
transmitted.* 

But now we are made aware of another and re- 
markable characteristic of art and its work, 
namely, that these individual, particular appetites, 
passions, feelings, of the particular will play a two- 
fold part. On the one hand they link all men to- 
gether by reason of the invariableness of their 
presence in all. Our individual character in these 
common characteristics links us all together; my 
love, my hate, my hunger and thirst, enable me to 
understand and share your love, your hate, your 
hunger and thirst. These parts of the Universal 
will, as we have seen, help to unite all men by giving 
them a common ground of understanding and sym- 
pathy for each other. But again, and on the other 
hand, these loves and hates, hungers and thirsts, 
coming face to face with each other in the external 
physical world, lead men to conflict of will. My 
love opposes yours ; my hunger asks satisfaction as 
against, in despite, if you please, of yours. Art, 
therefore, only uses such feelings so far as they 
tend to make all hearts beat as one. The con- 

* Paraphrased from " What is Art ? " 



112 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

flicting of appetites, the opposing of will to will, 
is not art's work. 

" And all art has this characteristic, that it 
unites people. Every art causes those to whom the 
artist's feeling is transmitted to unite in soul with 
the artist, and also with all who receive the same 
impression." * 

With this view of art comes a greater clearness 
of vision ; many of the absurd — and because with- 
out any clear understanding, necessarily endless — 
discussions disappear, and with them go the foolish 
attempts to establish useless and irrelevant defini- 
tions, such as standards of beauty, and the equally 
absurd idea that the object of art is to minister to 
beauty, the accidental, rather than to feeling, the 
essential. 

It is easy to perceive how — lacking this funda- 
mental view of art as the vehicle of feeling — the 
idea of beauty, and of the office of art to serve 
beauty, arose, for to a narrow and strictly techni- 
cal view of art work, regarding it as something 
which concerns itself chiefly with the copying or 
reproducing of outward objects, it was very nat- 
ural to fix attention on the character of that copy, 
its outward aspect of beauty, to the neglect of the 
vital function of conveying feeling. That a beau- 
tiful object did more effectively convey joyous 
feeling was instinctively understood, and then it 
was easy to assume that the only end of the work 
of art was to embody beauty and to announce that 

*"What is Art?" page 142. 



ART 113 

all art has to do is to mirror forth beauty, forget- 
ting that its purpose in mirroring beauty is sim- 
ply the better to convey feeling; forgetting, too, 
especially, how often art has mirrored suffering, 
ugliness, even hideousness, with the end of convey- 
ing feeling. 

From the strictly representative arts of painting 
and sculpture, this idea of beauty and the duty of 
art to serve beauty suffered a sort of metaphorical 
translation to the more abstract arts, and poems 
and music came to be spoken of as beautiful. 
What was worse, an idea arose of a standard of 
beauty which was to have universal application, 
and such standard was sought for in learned dis- 
cussions, as if beauty were the all-in-all of art in- 
stead of only an important instrument of that all- 
in-all, — namely, feeling. For certain it is that 
scarcely anything possesses such power to inspire 
feeling as beauty, and it is only in this sense that 
it has importance in art. Beautiful objects excite 
powerfully the feelings of all, and prompt the art- 
ist to represent them ; but to enter into a discussion 
(such as the learned have done) to elucidate the 
principles of beauty, fix its standards, dwell on its 
peculiar properties, etc., while ignoring the only 
purpose of its existence — the conveyance of feel- 
ing — would be like an engineer who should devote 
all his attention to polishing the brasswork of his 
engine to the neglect of the steam that gave it ef- 
ficiency. 

A standard of beauty is, of course, an impossi- 



114 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

bility, as these learned discussions (if they can be 
said to have succeeded in proving anything) have 
established. We cannot measure art, therefore, 
in this way. But a standard of feeling may not be 
beyond our powers, for if art is simply concerned 
with feeling, using, if you please, beauty — vary- 
ing as it will and must with every age and nation 
— as one of its most powerful agents in the ex- 
citing of feeling, then if we can fix some standard 
of feeling, we may have a true measure of works 
of art. If all art is what has just been stated, 
the handmaid of the Universal, if its purpose is the 
uniting of men in common feelings, and the for- 
warding of that unity of will with the Universal 
will by this means, then surely it is not too bold a 
conclusion to declare that all feelings conveyed by 
works of art are to be measured by this standard, 
that this question is the only test of works of art : 
" How and to what degree of perfection does this 
work of art serve its purpose of uniting men in 
common feelings? Does it conduce to love and 
sympathy of all with all? " For then we may 
further add that the work of art whose feelings, 
when conveyed to others by it, tend in the highest 
degree to this end, is the greatest and highest as 
compared with all others. In other words, har- 
mony of will with will is the great end of all art. 
As it best and most effectively accomplishes this, 
the work of art is to be measured. 

That work of art is the highest in value which 
expresses most truly in the concrete and particular 



ART 115 

the Universal, for art must, as a vehicle for feel- 
ing, deal with the concrete, the particular. We 
shall see presently that we can have no feeling save 
as it is concerned with the concrete, with something 
particular, something individual. Abstractions, 
Universals, convey no feelings. 

And so we may define art as the expression of the 
Universal in the concrete. A few words upon this 
definition : First, it must express the Universal 
in some way; that is what makes it a work of art 
as distinguished from a mere copy or reproduction 
of some natural object. A photograph will give 
us a far better reproduction of the human figure 
than Giotto's awkward painting, but Giotto has 
put something more into his work than the photo- 
graph can have — his feeling, himself. By ex- 
pressing this, it is taken out of the merely repre- 
sentative function of the photograph and gets that 
touch of the Universal that makes it a work of art. 
This turns the facsimile of some outward object, 
a Madonna, a child, a saint, what you will of the 
external world, into a conduit for feelings com- 
mon to all, that link all men together in a common 
bond of fellowship and brotherhood by reason of 
their Universality, by reason of the fact that these 
feelings are the common property of all; so the 
picture gets its touch of the Universal. And by 
the scope and breadth of its Universality we have 
to judge of its excellence as a work of art. The 
more perfectly and completely it appeals to all 
men, the more perfect and complete is it as a work 



116 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

of art. Now, as we all know, it is the simple, ele- 
mental feelings that appeal to all men and that 
make them all one. Love of God, love of country, 
of home ; pity for the downtrodden, sympathy for 
the suffering, resentment against wrongdoing; all 
these are of the simple, fundamental feelings of 
men, and works of art that convey these and like 
feelings are, therefore, the great art of the world. 
As we descend the scale of feeling to less universal 
feelings, to the peculiar, the artificial, the acquired, 
we go away from the Universal toward the feelings 
that are common to only a few, and so such works 
of art tend less to make all men one, to unite men 
together in a common humanity; they may unite 
cultivated coteries, educated and trained scholars, 
but leave out the great masses of men, and so in a 
measure lose their Universality. Then when we 
go a step farther to the abnormal, the sophisti- 
cated and highly artificial feelings to which appeal 
the problem play, some of the impressionist paint- 
ings, the obscure and scarcely intelligible words of 
some poetry of modern times, we reach art which, 
so far from expressing universal feeling, seems 
rather to express particular, singular, eccentric 
feeling that repels the great masses of men ; and 
so far from uniting and binding all men together in 
a common brotherhood, seems to repel and repulse 
the men of average feelings, and so tend to sepa- 
rate and particularize instead of Universalizing 
them. I am united with all men by a great work 
of art which makes me a sharer in some mighty 



ART 117 

elemental feeling like love, or pity, or indignation 
at wrongdoing. I am shut in upon myself, shut 
out from other men, by a work of art which gives 
me some peculiar abnormal feeling such as only 
I or a few specially instructed people can feel. 

So much for the Universality which enters into 
a work of art and gives us at the same time its 
measure. By its Universality you shall know it. 

Secondly, there is the element of concrete par- 
ticularity which is the other essential of a true work 
of art. It is by this element that the work of art 
is able to excite or convey feeling. Feeling can 
only be called forth by some particular object pre- 
sented to and impressed on the consciousness in as 
vivid a way as possible. It is the presentation of 
this concrete thing in pigment, stone, or word, — 
in picture, statue, novel, play, or poem, — that is 
the task of art ; in this its technique is displayed, 
— that is, the skillfulness with which the object 
is treated; in this its success or failure in a tech- 
nical sense is seen, for it is the first requirement 
of art of any sort, high or low, that some feeling 
of some sort should be produced by it. And this 
can only be done by this presentation of the par- 
ticular object. I cannot be made to feel love, 
pity, indignation, by the mere pronouncing of 
those words ; I must be shown a vivid representa- 
tion of an object of love, or pity or indignation: 
then the feeling will occur naturally in connection 
with the object. I cannot love or pity or be in- 
dignant over nothing, or over an abstraction, a 



118 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

universal. All feeling is concrete, particular; I 
must love a particular person or thing, — and so 
of all the rest. Such is the natural law of feeling. 

These two elements of Universality and of con- 
creteness seem so utterly, fundamentally, opposed 
to each other that it may seem as if a work of art 
were taxed with an impossible task to blend or 
unite the two as it must. It is here, however, that 
the skill of the great artist displays itself in the 
manner in which he takes up the ordinary, the par- 
ticular, the average, and idealizes, eliminates, takes 
out something here and adds something there, so 
that you have the individual thing — man, woman, 
landscape, event, what you will — of the particu- 
lar, taken up and put into touch with the whole 
in such a way that the spectator or reader may 
be moved and feel, and yet realize that relation 
of the object presented with the Universal. 
Sometimes this realization may be very slight, as 
in some trifling work; sometimes it may be over- 
whelming and subduing in some masterpiece of the 
world. 

Tolstoi tells us upon this point that the artist 
must have the feeling himself if he is to transmit 
it to us truly and well; the mere passing over of 
somebody else's feelings transmitted to him will not 
be " infectious," as he phrases it.* 

* Paraphrased and condensed from "What is Art?" page 
93. 



RELIGION 119 



RELIGION 



But there is a further work to be done before 
satisfactory unity with the Universal will can be 
attained. The mutual relations and the inter- 
change of common feelings between man and man 
which we rejoice in and crave, and which are 
helped and fostered by true art, while they do in- 
deed form an important and necessary step toward 
unity with the Universal will, form yet only a par- 
tial step, just as our fellowmen are only a part of 
that whole to whose will we seek to be reconciled. 

There is still the craving for reconciliation, not 
merely with man, but with the all of which men 
are but a part. We still ask : " How came we to 
find ourselves in these relations? What are we 
all doing here? What is the purpose of our life 
together as a community and as individuals in this 
great whole of which we know ourselves parts?" 
This is a different want from the craving for 
human fellowship and harmonious intercourse with 
our fellows. It is a deeper craving and demands 
a more profound satisfaction. It has two sides : 
the intellectual desire to know, to understand; and 
the emotional contentment which is only to be 
gained by understanding the general object and 
purpose of our life, contemplated in relation to 
the whole. So only can all wills be rendered truly 
harmonious, by ascertaining their purpose and re- 
lation to the whole. 



120 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

And all religions find in this craving their com- 
mon basis ; they are the result of the struggle, the 
effort, to find reconciliation with the whole ; in 
short, they present to man more or less perfectly 
that scheme or plan of reconciliation which he 
craves, and must in some shape possess. Whether 
polytheistic, monotheistic, or what you will, they 
all spring from the feeling that in some way the 
individual is to be placed in relation with the whole 
and out of a discontent until this is accomplished. 
Very often this takes the shape of an endeavor to 
sacrifice the individual to the whole, either par- 
tially by self-torture, punishment, penance; or 
wholly by immolation, the casting away of life 
under some idea of obligation. In the earlier re- 
ligions there is usually an effort to visualize the 
whole in some impressive way for the eye. By 
setting up an image, or idol, as it is called ; or by 
selecting some natural object as embodying it, 
such as the sun — sun worship ; or by some less 
gross, more intellectual mode, the mind tries to 
make for itself some symbol, some visualization, of 
that something which it feels must govern the rela- 
tion of the individual to the whole. All religions 
have this elemental want at their base, — i.e., the 
emotional and the intellectual craving to be in 
relation with the whole. Religion is the set and 
purposeful attempt to satisfy this want; its devel- 
opment, like that of law in the domain of conduct, 
is from a very slight recognition of the particular 
to a very careful and especial regard for it as a 



RELIGION 121 

part of that whole with which it is to be put in 
relation. From pagan cruelty and disregard of 
the individual, we trace a progress to the religion 
of humanity, as it is called, where the sense of 
obligation to the Universal, the whole, is almost 
lost in the endeavor to preserve the particular in 
all its particularity ; and the healing the sick, help- 
ing the fallen, aiding the poor, are the duties chiefly 
dwelt upon, as if this care for the part were all 
that were required by the obligation all feel to 
serve the whole which is composed of the parts. 

For this reason, therefore, in their early stages, 
their first endeavors to reconcile and put in rela- 
tion the particular and the Universal, law and 
religion were simple, easy of application and of 
apprehension. Those nice distinctions, careful 
limitations, which were to preserve the particular 
in all its particularity so far as was compatible 
with its relations with the whole, were not invented. 
It was not then perceived so acutely as at present 
that the right of the particular to its particularity, 
in so far as it made up the total or whole, was 
in truth the right of the whole itself, which was 
made up of the sum of the particulars. 

While a more intellectual craving than that for 
mere human sympathy, community of feeling, fel- 
lowship with other men, which finds satisfaction 
by art, this craving, of which religion is the satis- 
fying instrument, is not devoid of a feeling of its 
own, variously described and differing much in in- 
tensity with different individuals. Until this crav- 



122 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

ing is satisfied, there is a feeling to which the gen- 
eral name of spiritual discomfort or dissatisfaction 
might be given. In sensitive, highly susceptible 
individuals it includes and reaches to a positive 
agony of feeling until in some way the sufferer is 
put in right relations with the whole, or fancies 
that he is so put. Remorse, which is one of the 
names for the extreme phases of this feeling, we 
are told has sometimes forced men to walk barefoot 
in the snow that by physical pain they might palli- 
ate their spiritual suffering. 

Remorse is, of course, the extreme, the intense, 
phase of that craving for harmony with the Uni- 
versal, a phase of it rendered unusually keen by 
some immediate or particular transgression of that 
harmony by a wrongful act which emphasizes the 
out-of-placeness of the individual with the whole, 
the Universal, and renders more urgent the conse- 
quent necessity of getting back into harmony 
with it. 

In the very opposite extreme of the craving, the 
milder type of the transgression of that harmony, 
we find that men lacking this proper relation with 
the Universal, lacking that end or purpose in their 
lives, are afflicted with that feeling to which the 
word ennui is sometimes applied, as expressing the 
milder type of unhappiness which results from lack 
of purpose in life. For lack of purpose is but 
another name for want of true harmony, proper 
relations with the Universal, the whole. It is this 



RELIGION 123 

that breeds that deadly monotony from which 
ennui springs. 

The constant repetition of even the keenest 
pleasures fatigues and wearies if continued end- 
lessly, for the root of the evil, monotony, lies just 
here; it has no future, no prospect, no vista, no 
purpose or end ; it never reaches a climax or a cri- 
sis. It is its purposelessness that is the essence of 
its curse. It is at this point that religion steps 
in ; its part it is to give purpose to the particular 
will, end to the individual life. It gives vista to 
the narrowest lot, horizon to the most restricted 
surroundings. It unites man, the particular, to 
the whole; knits his life and purposes, his petty 
acts, into the great Universal purposes, the mighty 
Universal acts. It gives to his intellect a scheme, 
a purpose, which includes his particularity, ration-* 
alizes it into complete harmony with the whole. 
But a merely intellectual comprehension is far from 
sufficient to satisfy the human craving for harmony 
with the Universal. Religion must appeal to and 
satisfy feeling, and this it does with its forms and 
ceremonials, its churches, its music, its services 
more or less elaborate ; in other words, by its wor- 
ship it calls to feeling. These are but its machin- 
ery, and they may vary as the individual feeling 
varies ; some men must have, for their feeling of 
reverence, of worship, to enable them to realize in 
feeling their dependence and their subordination 
to the Universal, elaborate ceremonials, splendid 



124 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

glass, imposing architecture, inspiring music ; oth- 
ers shrink from this, and to them a white walled 
room devoid of all ornament, an assembly with no 
appointed head, a ceremonial which is a negation 
of every form, are the only congenial methods of 
worship. These are unessential means to arriving 
at that state of feeling which is as much necessary 
to true religion as the intellectual knowledge of the 
scheme and place of the particular, the individual, 
in the whole. For a mere knowledge, however cor- 
rect, that I am part of a great whole, that I owe 
service and loyalty to that whole, that I must sub- 
ordinate myself to it, moves no responsive feeling, 
although it may answer my intellectual craving to 
learn where and what I am in the whole. Feeling 
can never be awakened to such abstractions. Tell 
me that this whole, this Universal, is a great Al- 
mighty being, like, and yet far beyond, all human 
beings ; paint his love to me, his care for me, his 
giving himself for me ; and then feeling is aroused, 
and worship, which is the expression of feeling, is 
born. I long to bow before this Almighty power; 
I seek to express my devotion to it by gifts laid 
on its altar, by hymns and music voicing my emo- 
tions of reverence, fear, and love; I try to repre- 
sent in picture or in marble my conceptions of that 
power; I rejoice in all the pomp and ritual with 
which I can surround that service, for so I vivify 
and stimulate my imagination to realize in feeling 
what I owe and ought to render in homage. 

Again, worship brings us back from the par- 



RELIGION 125 

ticularity of our everyday world of feeling. All 
week long we are exerting and asserting our par- 
ticularity, struggling with the world, getting all 
we can ; and all the feeling that belongs to this 
struggle, — the selfishness of the particular, the 
eagerness to take, to win and keep for ourselves, — 
has filled us. To correct this over-emphasis of the 
particular, restore the balance to our feelings, we 
have worship that puts us in touch with the Uni- 
versal; makes us feel as well as know our relation 
to the whole, rejoice in our subordination to the 
whole, long to give ourselves to it and for it, not 
coldly and intellectually, but with the fervor of 
the missionary, the martyr. We are made to feel 
our oneness with the whole and to know the joy 
of being a part, forgetting our particularity in this 
Universality. 

Thus religion has its two sides, feeling and 
knowledge ; in truth, the two are so involved that 
we cannot really separate them. No man can feel 
without knowing, nor can he know without feeling. 
Even a proposition in geometry carries some feel- 
ing with the cognizing of it ; and the purest feeling 
of love to God must have some mental idea, some 
knowledge of the God toward which that feeling 
goes out. 

Religion, therefore, is to be understood as the 
method by which, in these two domains of feeling 
and thought, man, the particular, the individual, 
comes into harmony with the whole, the Universal. 
By it he reconciles himself with the Universal, not 



126 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

merely in avoiding all conflict of his will with its 
will, but by assimilating his will to its will, by 
adopting its ends and purposes as his so far as his 
capacity permits. 

For religion means this and this only: true and 
correct relations of the particular, the individual, 
to the whole, the Universal; and, as a consequence 
of these relations, a recognition of the necessity of 
acting in proper harmony with it. 

Whether the spiritual discomfort that results 
from a want of these true relations be the acute 
suffering called remorse or only the milder one of 
mere ennui, the cause is the same essentially. Life 
without purpose makes monotony, and out of mo- 
notony springs ennui. Even the most pleasura- 
ble experiences, if repeated endlessly, have upon 
them this curse of monotony, so that it is not in- 
frequently the case that those who have nothing 
but pleasure after pleasure, repeated endlessly in 
their lives, are the most wearied and sick of it; 
sometimes kill themselves because of it. 

Man knows he is but a part of the whole; he 
knows his petty purposes and objects. The vari- 
ous acts of his living cannot have any significance 
by themselves ; they must be unified, brought into 
touch with the Universal will, or be cast aside as 
nought. 

The struggle men make to attain a true relation 
with the Universal, or what they esteem a true re- 
lation, is constant ; and the distress they suffer for 



RELIGION 127 

want of it, the satisfaction they find in its attain- 
ment, is the history of all religions. 

Perhaps there can be found no better concise ac- 
count of this struggle than is presented in Mr. 
William James' interesting work, " Varieties of 
Religious Experience." In it for the first time, 
so far as the writer is aware, are grouped together 
accounts of the innumerable individuals who in so 
many different fashions have felt the need of set- 
ting themselves in right relations to the world 
above and around them, urged thereto by a sense 
that it was necessary for them, as part of the Uni- 
versal whole, to be in definite known relations to it, 
and to ascertain and perform all the obligations, 
ties, and duties that follow such relations. The 
degree of sensitiveness to this varies greatly in 
different men ; with some the sense of the necessity 
of this orientation of themselves with the Universe 
is so overwhelming that they cannot rest day or 
night until it is accomplished ; with others it is a 
mere matter of course that they should ascertain 
and accept relations with the whole, and perform 
the duties growing thereout with cheerful alacrity 
but without notable enthusiasm. To the former 
the joy of finding this true relation sometimes sur- 
passes all words, while to the latter it is only a 
mild and gentle satisfaction. In this, as in other 
matters, men differ according to their character, 
but it is probably safe to say that with all, until 
this relation is established in some way, there is 



128 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

at least a sense of uneasiness, of a something to be 
done before the man can feel himself right with the 
world. 

This involves, as has been already remarked, 
both an intellectual satisfaction — an understand- 
ing of where and how he, the particular, stands 
with regard to the Universal — and an emotional 
satisfaction which is the prompting motive, the 
satisfaction of a desire for harmony with the Uni- 
versal as expressed in all that surrounds and en- 
virons. If a man is to be in harmony with the 
Universal, he must understand, or think he under- 
stands, it. The intellect and the feelings, ideas 
and emotions, are inseparable: there is no feeling, 
however faint, without some idea ; no idea without 
some feeling. No man can feel in harmony with 
a Universal of which he can form no idea — I do 
not say a necessarily correct idea, but an idea 
upon which his feelings may center and with which 
he can make his feelings and his ideas coincide with 
more or less completeness. It is thus each man 
finds his place and recognizes his obligations to the 
Universal, and by so doing reaches that state of 
harmony with the Universal which he feels com- 
pelled to seek. This feeling of compulsion is an 
elemental necessity, without possibility of explana- 
tion or further analysis ; we can only say, so it is 
— an appetite, so to speak, as elemental as hunger 
or thirst. Different men describe this condition 
differently, but it all comes to this. 



RELIGION 129 

Professor Leuba, as quoted by Mr. James, thus 
expresses this reconciliation of the individual with 
the Universal, the whole : " When the sense of es- 
trangement fencing men about in a narrowly lim- 
ited ego breaks down, the individual finds himself 
at one with all creation. He lives in the Universal 
life ; he and man, he and nature, he and God, are 
one." * And, as Mr. James adds : " A passion 
of willingness, of acquiescence, of admiration, is 
the glowing center of this state of mind." ** 
That is, there follows this harmony of will with 
Universal will which brings content out of discon- 
tent ; peace out of turbulent, unrestful questionings. 

At the root of all varieties of experience of this 
sort will always be found, as the vital point, the 
common characteristic that marks them all, one 
and the same thing in different dress — this strug- 
gle to place the individual in true relations with 
the Universal. Sometimes it is almost mystical in 
its manifestation, as when the poet Tennyson 
writes that " individuality itself seemed to dissolve 
and fade away into boundless being ; and this not a 
confused state, but the clearest, the surest of the 
surest, utterly beyond words ; where death was an * £ J 

almost laughable impossibility, the loss of person- 
ality (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the 
only true life." * 

Perhaps a sudden transition from this to the ex- 



* Quoted page 384, " Varieties of Religious Experience.' 
Quoted page 306, " Varieties of Religious Experience.' 



#* 



130 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

pression of another, utterly different individual, 
Saint John of the Cross," * may illuminate the 
point further by the violence of the contrast of its 
mysticism and the bearing of it on that primeval 
craving for the whole, the Universal. Here are a 
few admonitions for the conduct of a religious: 
" When you stop at one thing, you cease to open 
yourself to the All." " For to come to the All, 
you must give up the All." " And if you should 
attain to owning the All, you must own it desiring 
nothing." It is interesting to remark the intel- 
lectual aspect of the struggle proceeding side by 
side with the emotional and illustrating forcibly 
what has been said as to the necessity for some in- 
tellectual insight to accompany the emotional im- 
pulse toward the Universal and unity with it. 
Very often this results in mysticism; the effort to 
understand the Universal, to state it in terms, goes 
on by a process of abstraction, a taking away of 
the particular and individual as if the Universal, 
the whole, was to be reached by taking away its 
parts. All sorts of contradictory statements are 
thus made ; for, very naturally, statements that ex- 
clude the individual, the concrete, by which alone 
the human mind can know or have knowledge, be- 
come unintelligible. 

Observe this intellectual attempt of that mystic 
of mystics, Jacob Behmen, to express his thinking 
in cognizable terms. " Primal love," he tells us, 
" may fitly be compared to nothing ; for it is 

* Quoted page 306, " Varieties of Religious Experience." 



RELIGION 131 

deeper than anything and is as nothing compared 
with respect to all things, forasmuch as it is not 
comprehensible by any of them. . . . And because 
it is nothing respectively, it is therefore free from 
all things and is that only good which a man 
cannot express or utter what it is, there being 
nothing to which it may be compared to express 
it by." * And again, " When thou art gone 
forth wholly from the creature and from that 
which is visible, and art become nothing to all that 
is Nature and creature, then thou art in that eter- 
nal one which is God Himself." ** 

This is only a mystical attempt to express the 
relation of the individual, the particular, to the 
Universal, the whole. In it is very palpable the 
difficulty of the task which lies just here, to 
preserve the individuality of the individual while 
merging it — as the instinct of man is always in- 
sistent on doing — in the whole. " We must put 
the individual," they seem to say, " into the Uni- 
versal; yet we must preserve it there, save its 
individuality." From this theoretical position, 
this intellectual perception of the relation of the 
particular to the Universal and the subordination 
of the former to the latter, there results a transi- 
tion in life and practice, feeling and action, to the 
asceticism of the hermit and the monks. The sup- 
pression of all egoistic desires seems a short and 
obvious road to a true relation with the whole. 

* Quoted page 417, " Varieties of Religious Experience." 
** Quoted page 418, " Varieties of Religious Experience." 



132 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

The individual is thus lost, blotted out in the 
whole. 

Christian and Buddhist agree in this essential, 
however much they may vary their expression of 
it. St. Paul's " I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth 
in me " is translated by the Indian Vedentists 
into " Not a part, not a mode of that, but iden- 
tically that, that Absolute Spirit of the world," * 
meaning, I take it, that thus the individual be- 
comes part of the Universal. The reality is the 
same for each, but conceived differently according 
to their varying capacity. The man of the lowest 
intelligence, the savage to whom the above expres- 
sions would be as Greek, yet in his own way feels, 
thinks, and acts this essential reality of his relation 
to the whole, for every act that is not directed to 
self, that takes one step beyond the self, must find 
its reason and cause just there, in that sense of a 
relation to the whole, no matter how undeveloped 
or faint that sense may be. 

As Mr. James sums it up, all religions have a 
uniformity of deliverance in this ; they all have 
their origin in our uneasiness of feeling, which in 
the simplest terms means that there is (1) some- 
thing wrong about us as we naturally stand; (2) 
that this uneasiness is to be relieved, the wrong- 
ness cured, by making connection with a higher 
power.** 

* Page 508, " Varieties of Religious Expression," some- 
what paraphrased. 

** Page 419, " Varieties of Religious Expression," some- 
what paraphrased. 



RELIGION 133 

To reach the Universal, to put himself in true 
relations with the whole, it is thus made plain, the 
individual must yield up something of his particu- 
larity ; all attempt at religion, that is, at the right 
relation of the particular and the whole, go more 
or less directly toward this goal. How much is 
to be given up, how much preserved of that par- 
ticularity? Here is the crucial question answered 
in a thousand different ways by different religions. 

Perhaps we shall learn more of this by taking 
a wide sweep and going into an entirely different 
world from that we have just been observing. If 
we could study a man of an entirely different type, 
with different environment, in the throes of this 
struggle, we might gather valuable knowledge as 
to the essentials of the struggle. Fortunately, 
apart from Christian tradition (which we are so 
prone to regard as the sole and only source of 
knowledge when there is question of religion) we 
have an account, with much minuteness of detail, 
of just such a struggle by a man of great original 
force of character and entirely independent of all 
Christian or its preceding Jewish tradition. 
Whether we consider the story of Buddha, as 
handed down to us, entirely true or merely a leg- 
end invented by a deeply philosophical people to 
set forth their spiritual struggles toward the Uni- 
versal, the story itself is equally instructive, for 
it is an account of the studied, deliberate attempt 
of a man to escape from the particularity of the 
individual to the Universality of the whole by way 



134 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

of religion, — that is, by finding some relation, 
some proper placing, of the individual in the 
whole. It is the finding of a reconciliation of his 
particularity with its Universality ; or, if we would 
be more concrete, the prescribing to his desires, 
wishes (his will), the limits that are necessary to 
make them conform with the Universal will of the 
whole. 

Buddha, or as he is more properly called, Gau- 
tama, we are told, was born to great wealth and 
high rank ; that is to say, he was placed in circum- 
stances that served to intensify and emphasize the 
particular by affording him unusual opportunity 
and full scope to indulge without restraint his 
wishes, desires, — his individual will. He was the 
son of a Rajah, and gave himself to pleasure. 

The Sutra of the Great Renunciation tells us 
that he fled from all this, from his young and 
beautiful wife, his luxurious home, and newly-born 
child. In the full flood of his enjoyment a young 
girl sang the triumph of his particularity. 
" Happy the father, happy the wife, of such a son 
and husband " were her words. In the word 
" happy," as used, lay a double meaning ; it also 
signifies saved, freed, delivered from the chain of 
existence. It suggested to Gautama a train of 
thought long latent ; he put its suggestion into im- 
mediate action, and left that night all these behind 
him to become a despised student and seeker after 
truth. Penniless and homeless he went forth, a 



RELIGION 135 

beggar for his daily sustenance; and at last he 
finds a solution of his struggle. And what, then, 
was the answer, the solution, which he found, — 
or first, perhaps, we should ask rather what 
was the exact problem, the difficulty, that troubled 
him in the midst of his happy condition of wealth 
and rank? What drove him away from them into 
the exile of poverty and of wandering over the 
earth's surface? 

We may state it in his own words, used when he 
thought he had attained what he sought. He de- 
clares that now he has become free from all de- 
sires ; in other words, he has escaped from his par- 
ticularity, and the solution which he finds is Nir- 
vana, rest, negation, the destruction of all desires. 
In short, his solution of the problem of particu- 
larity is its destruction. He does not reconcile it 
with the Universal, he destroys it. We may not 
like his answer; we cannot doubt, however, what 
his question was: it was the reconciliation of the 
particlar in some way with the Universal. It was 
this burden of his own particularity, expressed in 
all his wealth of riches and earthly satisfactions, 
that drove him forth into the world. It was the 
eternal problem that has plagued man from his 
very beginning. His answer is aptly expressed in 
a passage of the Buddhist sacred writings thus: 
" I say that Tathagata is emancipated by reason 
of the destruction of, detachment from, cessation, 
resignation, forsaking, and relinquishment, of all 



136 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

imaginings, all agitations, and proud inclinations 
toward everything that maketh I and me." * 
Philosophically speaking, Buddha may be said to 
have overlooked in his solution of the problem the 
obvious truth that this negation of the particular, 
" everything that maketh I and me," is to that 
extent a negation of the whole as well, for the par- 
ticular is a part of the whole. His answer is thus 
inadequate, unsatisfactory, and becomes more ap- 
parently so when contrasted with the Christian 
answer to the same problem. Christianity pre- 
serves the particular at the same time that it 
reconciles it with the whole. It limits and confines, 
but does not destroy. Its solution of the question 
is not a negation of the particular, which, if car- 
ried to its logical conclusion, would be a negation 
of the Universal itself ; for the content of the Uni- 
versal must be found in the particular ; deprive the 
particular of content, and you deprive the Uni- 
versal. 

It is an error to which all religions are open — 
the tendency toward a negation of the particular. 
In Christianity itself we find again and again the 
revival more or less clearly of the Buddhist doc- 
trine ; for asceticism, the eliminating from the par- 
ticular of all its content (its desires and wants 
despised and destroyed instead of ruled into accord 
with the Universal), is one of the commonest forms 
of religious teaching, both as a system and as the 

* " Buddhism in Translations," Henry Clark Warren, Har- 
vard University, 1896. 



RELIGION 137 

individual expression of a longing for a better and 
higher rule of life, i. e. as an escape from the par- 
ticular and its limitations.* 

But again we see emerging on this internal side 
of our subject — happiness — the same rule or 
canon as upon the external side — conduct. That 
law or rule of life which shall allow the utmost of 
particularity consistent with harmony with the 
Universal is the true rule of the highest happiness 
precisely as in conduct we found that the most 
perfect rule or law of conduct was that which gave 
the freest play to the particular consistent with 
harmony with the Universal. 

True religion does not destroy or despise the 
particular ; it cherishes and helps it to greater and 
fuller particularity so long as that is consistent 
with the Universal will of the whole. 

Religion and art are thus both revealed as the 
efforts of the individual to escape from his particu- 
larity in so far as that separates and divides and 

* It is highly probable that asceticism had its first and 
earliest beginnings in India, to the character of whose peo- 
ple it was peculiarly suited, for according to the latest inves- 
tigations (Flinders-Petrie's " Personal Religion in Egypt be- 
fore Christianity") there was no trace of the ascetic ideal 
in Egyptian, Jewish or Greek life before 600 b. c. The first 
trace of it is found in an ascetic community in Egypt of 
about the middle of the fourth century b. c. Its passage 
over from India into Egypt may reasonably be conjectured 
to have been by means of the almost universal dominion of 
Persia about 500 b. c, when Indians were serving in her 
armies and her rule extended from India to Cyrene. By the 
middle of the first Christian century the ascetic life was 
practiced by Egyptian, Jew, and Greek. 



138 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

isolates him ; for such separation and isolation are 
distressing to him. For his own satisfaction he 
must place himself in harmonious relation with all 
the world about him, both animate and inanimate, 
— i. e. with the great whole of the Universe. But 
it is evident that it is only the separating and. 
isolating qualities of the particular that must be 
eliminated. 

And the true measure of all religion as well as 
art must be the degree of perfection with which 
they accomplish the end of their existence, — that 
is to say, the end of putting the particular in its 
true relation with the whole. That religion must 
be the highest which, while allowing free and un- 
trammelled development of each individual, brings 
that individual into the closest harmony with the 
Universal will. Religion is the attempt to hitch 
the wagon of the individual and particular will to 
the star of the Universal will. It finds a reason 
for the apparently unreasoning, senseless struggles 
of the work-a-day man for bare existence by ex- 
hibiting them in their true relation to the Universal 
will; that is to say, it exhibits the connection and 
relation of every particular and individual part to 
the whole. 

And the same rule applies to art: that work of 
art is the highest in value which expresses most 
truly in the concrete and particular the Universal. 
The greatest art, therefore, is simple, dealing with 
great fundamental feelings common to all men, for 
such we know, as already pointed out, are more 



RELIGION 139 

nearly related to the Universal. As art descends 
to an expression of the lesser feelings, — the more 
peculiar, or particular, or morbid even, — it leaves 
the Universal and grows more and more particular, 
and so of less value. 

Tolstoi, in his "What is Art? " * has well ex- 
pressed this by declaring that all art is bad which, 
instead of inspiring a common feeling of union and 
brotherhood among men, tends, by the feelings 
which it transmits, to separate and divide, to create 
conflict rather than harmony of will with will, which 
is the only true happiness for this world and the 
next. Such art, too, as deals with exclusive feel- 
ings, feelings peculiar to a class or a nation, is bad, 
since thus it tends to divide men instead of per- 
forming its true and noble office of uniting them. 
Even the most trifling and simple feelings which are 
common to all men may thus form the subject of a 
true art which by portraying and transmitting 
them may thus tend to unite all men in these lesser 
feelings as well as in the greater and more funda- 
mental.** 

And so in religion ; it is the separating, the di- 
viding, feelings that make sin. Evil is the denial 
in any way by the part of its relation and subor- 
dination to the whole, the undue emphasis of par- 
ticularity as against the Universal. This was the 
sin of the Pharisee condemned by the Master when 

* Page 142, and passim. 

** Paraphrased and condensed from " What is Art? " page 
144. 



140 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

he said, " Lord, I thank thee that I am not as other 
men are — extortioners, thieves." It was not evil 
for him to rejoice in his own virtue — that was a 
legitimate feeling enough; but that he made his 
virtues a wall of separation from others, that was a 
deep and fundamental sin. It was the same 
thought which led the Master to exclaim on 
another occasion : " Woe unto you, scribes and 
pharisees ; you make clean the outside," etc. " I 
tell you the publicans and harlots go into the 
Kingdom of God before you." * For these latter 
have not that spiritual pride of virtue which is one 
of the most conspicuous marks of particularity and 
that cuts it off from the whole, separates and 
divides, instead of uniting and harmonizing all. 
A goodness that separates a man from others is 
not true goodness, for all goodness finds its essence 
in this, that it is the harmonizing of the particular 
with the Universal, the part with the whole, the 
giving the particular its place in the whole which it 
can never have if it harbour separating, dividing 
ideas. We have seen that it is only the separating, 
the dividing, elements of the particular that must 
be eliminated. 

That religion or art that stirs up strife and 
conflict, that separates, therefore, man from man 
by expressing the particular so as to put it into 
opposition with the whole, is always false, unfaith- 
ful to its office; while that which brings them to- 
gether by inspiring feelings of sympathy, kinship, 

*St. Matthew's gospel, XXI: 31. 



RELIGION 141 

kindness to others, is true religion and true art. 
For example, and to make the test of practical 
application: a religion which divides men into 
castes, fosters class feeling, fails of its purpose, for 
this tends to exaggerate the particular, to inten- 
sify particularity, and so separate man from man. 
So that ascetical religion which, going to the op- 
posite extreme, would rob the particular of all its 
particularity, tends in a different manner, but to 
like effect, to separate. It deprives the individual 
of those common characteristics which serve as a 
basis to unite all men. It separates the particular 
even from the Universal, for that Universal will 
has for part of its content some of those very items 
thus taken away. To shut up men in monasteries 
and women in convents, and so eliminate those pas- 
sions, appetites, desires, which are part of the con- 
tent of all particulars, is to separate them from 
close sympathy and community with all their fel- 
low particulars and so erect a dividing wall which, 
it is true, is new and different from that of their 
natural individuality, but nevertheless constitutes 
as effective a means of keeping them apart, out of 
their true relation with the Universal, as an unre- 
strained particularity. For if my passions, my 
desires and needs, force me into conflict with my 
fellow particular on the one side, where the satis- 
factions due to each may be mutually exclusive so 
that either my hunger or his must go unappeased ; 
on the other side those very passions and desires 
are part of a particularity that is common to us 



142 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

both, and so a bond of union and mutual sympathy 
and understanding ; to destroy or ignore them is to 
destroy and ignore our common humanity expressed 
in them. 

And again, that art is the greatest which ex- 
presses best the commonest and most universal 
characteristics of our particularity. Great art is, 
therefore, simple, seeking its motives in the simple 
and fundamental contents of our particularity that 
are common to all men. Abstruse, morbid, eccen- 
tric manifestations of our particularity, just in 
proportion as they are such, are unfit for expres- 
sion in great art, for they are not common to all 
and so tend to separate and divide rather than unite 
men by calling forth sympathetic feelings. 

Studies of morbid development of character, 
problem novels and plays, fall within the condemna- 
tion of this rule, and of course so do all other 
works of art which like these unduly emphasize the 
particular and its contents as against the Universal 
will and its supreme control, or which ignore that 
control by exhibiting some item of particularity, 
passion, or desire, exercised beyond bounds and 
uncontrolled. Such art as is briefly styled vice 
triumphant, virtue unrequited, is of this sort; in 
short, any artistic work which fails in its expres- 
sion of particularity to bring it into reconciliation 
with the Universal. For art may be concisely de- 
fined as the expression of the particular in har- 
mony with and under its true relation with the 
Universal. It is the expression of this Universality 



EDUCATION OF THE WILL 143 

in the particular and concrete that makes it art, 
as distinct from the mere copy or reproduction of 
the particular. Concisely put, it may be said: 
All art is the expression of the Universal in the 
concrete. 



EDUCATION OF THE WILL 

It is evident that a will, one of whose definitions 
is that it " is a method of reaction of the self to 
the stimuli presented by the external world," must 
get its content, the matter of its willing, from that 
world. Of if we prefer to consider the will in its 
other, broader aspect, as the sum total of the de- 
sires, ideas, wants, of the self, it is equally evident 
that until some objects of desire, means of satisfac- 
tion of wants are given, no exercise of will can take 
place. 

Without these the will is in a sort of vacuum ; it 
is blank of all significance. Nothing calling upon 
it for choice, it cannot choose. In other words, 
the will has to be furnished with objects, to be 
educated by experience. This first, we might call 
the necessary, automatic, education of the will. It 
gives it material, fills it with objects of choice, 
furnishes it with relations to other wills, and varies 
greatly with the state of society in which each will 
finds itself. The will of a highly civilized man 
encompassed with a vast mesh of relations, connec- 
tions, occupations, objects of desire, inviting forth 



144 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

his will, is a very different will from that of a man 
in a barbarous or semi-civilized society, whose re- 
lationships are few, almost none, whose objects of 
desire are scanty and simple. The questions of 
right and wrong in the one will be much simpler ; no 
complicated conflicts or harmonies of will with will 
are likely to arise. The will of the latter will be 
so empty of content, of objects, of relations, com- 
pared with that of the former, that there will be a 
corresponding poverty of harmony or conflict by 
reason of the lack of content. The will of the 
savage man, of the ignorant, the child, the infant, 
is a very different will in its scope, content, variety, 
from that of the highly cultivated, the civilized, the 
educated, the mature man, not only in this — the 
primitive — sort of education, but still more in that 
store of conjunctions of substantive and acting 
ideas which form the artificial or secondary educa- 
tion of the will and which, crystallized into habits, 
we style character. 

Thus it appears that the will is the subject of 
education; that it not only is built up, as already 
described, by series after series of experiences, and 
so by the addition of many conjunctions of sub- 
stantive and acting ideas, as I have styled them, 
grows into a complicated and richly endowed 
faculty, but above all it is the subject of educa- 
tion by teaching, by the intentional presentation to 
it of substantive and acting ideas in such a manner 
that conjunctions of the two may be so impressed 
that they become inseparable. It is by this proc- 



EDUCATION OF THE WILL 145 

ess of education that character — developed will, 
if you choose to call it so — is made, and by such 
process all changes of character, moral reforma- 
tions, must be wrought out. 

This moral change, miracle though it seems, mys- 
terious in its ultimate analysis, is yet governed by 
laws, and is subject to conditions which we may 
trace, at least in part. 

We have seen the process by which naturally will 
is educated — built up step by step by additions 
made by experience — and change of will, moral 
reformation, is effected. 

It is to be noted likewise that the richer the con- 
tent of a will, the more subjects of desire, the 
greater its stock of ideas, the greater must be its 
capacity for happiness or misery ; for the summwm 
bonum, the harmony or unity of will with the Uni- 
versal will, will be the greater in exact ratio with 
the number and variety of contents which thus 
afford opportunity for unity. How vast and sug- 
gestive a field for speculation this opens up to the 
imaginative soul who can thus see in every new 
object of sympathy or love, of knowledge or of 
feeling, an added happiness which will go on in- 
creasing from year to year, from ason to ason of 
eternity itself ! For the soul grows larger and 
deeper with every added harmony of will. Its 
capacity for harmony of will with the Universal 
will grows richer, opening up an endless vista of 
increasing happiness for ever and ever. 

Perhaps it is thus we are to interpret that saying 



146 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

of the Scriptures, " In my Father's house are many 
mansions," — that is, in the next world all men of 
harmonious wills will not be of the same capacity 
for harmony, and to each the harmony of will with 
the Universal will can only be of the quality, and 
kind, and possess the diversity and richness, which 
each individual will possesses. Each man will have 
the highest happiness he is capable of, — that is, 
the perfect harmony of his will with the Universal 
will ; but that harmony and its corresponding hap- 
piness will be measured by the capacity of that 
particular will. Its happiness, while the greatest 
possible for that particular will, may be much less 
or much more in comparison with another particu- 
lar will, according as such other will is greater or 
less in content and variety. 

The greater the content of the individual will, 
that is, the wider its sympathies, the more numer- 
ous the objects of its love, its desires, interests, 
thoughts, ideas, the greater the harmony and its 
concomitant happiness, for so the particular will 
possesses that many more points of contact, objects 
about which it may be harmonious. It comes in 
touch with other wills in many more points, and 
thus its relations with all are multiplied. Its har- 
mony grows richer and more pleasurable because of 
this increase of relations with other wills, for the 
harmony, as already declared, is not a negative but 
a positive thing ; a will cannot be in harmony with 
another will save by having the contents of one will 
correspond with the contents of the other. And 



NATURE OF RIGHT AND WRONG 147 

so we may say — speaking, as it were, in metaphor 
adapted to the minds of the hearer — in the next 
world there will be many mansions, many kinds 
and degrees of that harmony of will with will out 
of which must spring the happiness in which each 
soul will find its abiding place, its habitation, its 
mansion, wherein to dwell. 



COMPLICATED NATURE OF RIGHT AND 
WRONG 

From this it of course follows that as these re- 
lations multiply and grow complicated, the cor- 
responding occasions for conflict increase in exact 
ratio with the occasions for harmony. In highly 
civilized society, with many wills, with many objects 
of will, many relations of each will to the other, 
rights and wrongs, harmonies or conflicts, of a 
most complex description spring up. What is 
right or wrong, — i. e. truly harmonious or other- 
wise, — is not easy of ascertainment when these re- 
lations of will with will out of which all questions 
of right or wrong arise become numerous and com- 
plicated. 

The contents of the will introduced thus by ex- 
perience, impressed in the various ways already 
indicated (by sensations agreeable or disagreeable ; 
by example, environment ; by deliberate coupling of 
one substantive idea with some particular acting 
idea, — that is, by teaching) constitute character, 



148 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

individual and particular; and this character is 
the will, and this will is the man in his very essence 
as good or evil. It is only by changing this con- 
tent, these ideas, that any change of character or 
will can be wrought. 

The manner of working this change of character 
is always something of a mystery, but it must con- 
sist in changing the character by changing these 
ideas which make it up, constitute it; these con- 
junctions of substantive and acting ideas must be 
altered. One of our difficulties in understanding 
the process grows out of our habit of thinking of 
character, of goodness or badness, of moral quali- 
ties, in the abstract, when in fact all the reality of 
these is found in the concrete, in the connection 
fixed and settled of certain substantive ideas with 
certain acting ideas so that the occurrence of the 
one always automatically calls up the other and 
demands its execution in deed. 

It is because of this that we are so often sur- 
prised at what appear to the superficial view to be 
strange anomalies of character. We behold, for 
example, a man who would not for a moment hesi- 
tate about returning another's pocketbook, but who 
hesitates just as little about selling worthless or 
watered stock for more than he considers it worth, 
or accepting some personal benefit as a considera- 
tion for acting in some particular way in a fiduciary 
or representative capacity. Moralists exclaim that 
they cannot see how an honest man can do such an 
act. But the explanation is obvious. Honesty is 



NATURE OF RIGHT AND WRONG 149 

not an abstract element of character that acts alike 
in all circumstances : it is rather a congeries of 
specific conjunctions of certain substantive with 
certain acting ideas, and when some new circum- 
stance occurs, some hitherto unknown substantive 
idea arises with which no fixed acting-idea is con- 
joined, there is nothing surprising in finding an 
acting idea annexing itself to the new substantive 
idea which does not agree in principle, as we say, 
with the acting ideas which by their fixed conjunc- 
tion with familiar substantive ideas have given a 
character of honesty to the individual. He, com- 
ing into contact with new, unfamiliar substantive 
ideas, appears delinquent for want of the conjunc- 
tion of like fixed acting ideas with such new sub- 
stantive ideas. 

In such a case it is the popular fashion to say 
that the man's conscience is not educated to meet 
the particular new situation; he requires teaching, 
instruction. 

But this teaching and the establishment of char- 
acter or the change of character wrought out by it 
must be by individual, concrete instances, just as 
the character itself is made up of this conjunction 
of countless concrete acting ideas, not of some one 
generalized abstract idea. The latter is the mere 
product of thought, and as such has no direct 
coercive influence on the will or on the translation 
of idea into deed. The abstract idea of honesty, 
for example, is but a label for a great class of con- 
crete acting-ideas ; it has no feeling or emotion con- 



150 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

nected with it which would lead any one to perform 
some specific act. For the reason that all idea of 
a specific act is abstracted from it, I cannot con- 
vert the abstract idea of honesty into an act or have 
any desire to do so, for no particular act is set 
forth in the idea. It is a mere abstraction to which 
no desire to act attaches. It is not such a sub- 
stantive idea that any acting idea can attach itself 
to it. 

But the moment some concrete substantive idea 
capable of conversion into a deed occurs, then there 
occurs with it the desire to perform some act with 
reference to it. The perception of another man's 
pocketbook brings with it at once the acting idea 
of returning it, which compels my conversion of 
the idea into the act. 

Individual character or will (for the two are 
identical) is the sum of all these acting ideas ; or, 
more abstractly, it is the habit of acting under 
given conditions in the same way, a way marked 
out by the acting ideas. 

To change character, to elevate or debase it, we 
must work upon this stock of acting ideas that 
constitute it and since they are all definite, con- 
crete, act-defining ideas, we must pursue the same 
method in our teaching. By concrete instances we 
must impress new acting ideas upon the will. 
These alone have the power to excite emotion, feel- 
ing, and so again they are the essential of all at- 
tempts to educate the will, for so alone can the 
feelings be moved. This is made plain in all those 



NATURE OF RIGHT AND WRONG 151 

daily appeals to the will with which we are familiar. 

The orator, the preacher, seek to persuade their 
audience, to move them to the performance of cer- 
tain acts, by presenting to their mind's eye vivid 
pictures, instances of the acts toward which they 
would urge them. When it is sought to make men 
charitable, distressing accounts of individual cases 
of suffering, illness, poverty are recounted, sug- 
gesting to each mind the acting-idea of relieving 
the same. If generosity is urged, we are moved by 
the tale of some child who gave her few pennies to 
the cause presented. How often has the widow's 
mite been made to do duty in this way ! Example 
is indeed a powerful teacher of these ideas and so 
a maker of character. Show a child the constant 
example of a parent who always bows his knees at 
the name of Christ in the creed, and that will be a 
very strange child indeed who will not bend his own 
childish knees when that particular part of the 
creed is recited. The acting-idea is surely fixed for 
it by the vivid act of the parent. 

It has been noted that mere abstractions are in- 
capable of exercising coercive power on the will for 
the simple reason that acting-ideas can never be 
joined to them, — it is only the definite, concrete 
idea that can be so joined; and it was also noted 
that the vividness of this idea or its contrary had 
important bearing on the degree of coercive power 
possessed by it over the will. 



152 THE WILL IN ETHICS 



SYMBOLS, CEREMONIES, THE CONCRETE 
PICTURE OR CONCEPTION 

This brings us to a very important doctrine of 
the teaching, the influencing, of the will. It is the 
part played by symbols, by pictures, by ceremonies, 
by concrete individual objects in dealing with the 
will. These tend in their several ways to the pro- 
duction of a vivid concrete idea to which acting- 
ideas are easily joined, and which, indeed, them- 
selves often suggest acting ideas ; and with them 
they carry that all important essential, feeling, 
emotion, which prompts the conversion of acting- 
idea into deed. Mere abstractions have no such 
attribute of feeling attached to them, or when they 
have, it is always by means of some concrete picture 
which has transferred its feeling to them. Thus 
the mere abstract ideas of country, nation, God, 
have no feeling naturally arising with their pres- 
ence in the mind. Whatever patriotic or religious 
feeling these abstractions command is feeling orig- 
inally created by far different, less abstract ideas, 
by concrete objects which embody vividly the 
things of whose reality they are but the pale 
shadow. 

For example, the king in many governments 
plays no more than the part of a symbol, a concrete 
picture of the state actualized with great magnifi- 
cence to appeal to the senses and so through them 
to influence the feelings and the will with an eye 



THE CONCRETE PICTURE 153 

to conduct, to loyal obedience, patriotism. An 
acute critic, Walter Bagehot, in discussing the 
royal functions in the English Constitution, re- 
marks that the king is only a theatrical property 
who fixes the attention of his subjects and attracts 
their obedience in order that the efficient parts of 
the government may utilize the same for the real 
purposes of government for which the king as such 
has no efficiency or value. 

So in a less degree the national flag, with its 
bright colors flaunting the sky, the broad landscape 
with the sun and cloud shadows lying on its green 
sward and shining waters, — these bring to the 
abstract idea of country its due measure of feeling 
just as the human picture of God as a loving 
father brings to that idea a feeling that gives the 
idea of God power and influence over the will. It 
may be a very small and insignificant part of God's 
reality, his fatherhood toward men ; his other rela- 
tions to the rest of the Universe may totally over- 
shadow that small part of him; but that is the 
important part for man and his will, and that 
translation of God into the concrete is the vitalizing 
for man of the abstract idea. Indeed, we have 
already seen how slowly man grasped the abstract 
idea of God, rising to it through infinite concrete 
ideas, the many gods of heathen mythology. This 
was the natural genesis of the notion of God, 
carrying with it as it grew the feelings which all 
concrete individual ideas do, and by a subtle 
transition endowing the abstract and highly ideal- 



154 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

ized God with the feelings originally generated by 
the concrete ideas of the sea, the storm, the thun- 
der, the fire, and so on, out of which the early gods 
were made. 

This same process takes place in a very like way 
with every child as it comes to grasp the idea. To 
the child of tender years the idea of God must be 
translated back from its high abstraction to its 
concrete beginnings, the process must be reversed 
for it ; and so God as a father, as being humanized 
and made man, is the only way in which the child's 
will can be educated to reverence, obedience, love, 
of him. 

The science of government and the administra- 
tion of the law, however, give us daily practical 
examples of the method of educating the will by 
emphasizing with symbols, ceremonies, appeals to 
the eye, the ear, the mind; with objects that shall 
rouse feeling and present concrete ideas with the 
purpose of so influencing and shaping the will. 

The more vivid an idea is made, the stronger 
usually will be its influence on the will and its 
power to create an impulse to act it out in deed. 
What a moving symbol, for instance, is the national 
flag, waving with its bright colors from the staff, 
symbolizing for the dullest in a definite picture the 
abstraction of his country ! For this man will lay 
down life when the very abstract idea of the nation 
might have so little of the definite that it would be 
hard to join it with any acting idea that would 
persuade a man to die for it. In like manner the 



THE CONCRETE PICTURE 155 

pageantry, magnificence, and state surrounding the 
head of the nation, the king, the emperor, the presi- 
dent, tend to vivify and impress that idea, and so 
serve to increase its effective power on the will. 
So of all the ceremonials of our daily life; the 
church wedding, with its robed clergyman, nuptial 
ring, wide pealing organ, emphasize, make real, the 
idea of marriage. So the forms and state of a 
court impress a definite idea on the criminal of the 
abstraction, justice, giving him a concrete idea as 
its symbol. 

Religion especially finds in symbols and vivid 
concrete embodiments of its mysteries an essential 
part of its education and control of the will and 
character, for the mere abstract idea of the Uni- 
versal all-powerful will with which the particular 
will must harmonize has little power to move the 
feelings. It is scarcely comprehensible. 

To tell man of countless worlds beyond worlds 
governed by some utterly unimaginable power 
would not satisfy his needs, nor would it be in- 
telligible to him. But chief of all defects, it would 
have no hold upon his feelings ; it would not move 
his will. The craving of his heart is for human 
love, human intelligence, human care over all, — 
in a word, for that concrete something to which 
acting ideas may attach. The truth may far ex- 
ceed this narrow construction of the Universal, 
but for man this is the only satisfying construc- 
tion ; it is his truth of the Universal. Abstractions 
have no comfort for his soul, and what is even more 



156 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

to the point, abstractions have no power over his 
will, for his will can only be moved through his 
feelings or emotions, and abstract ideas have no 
appeal to these. He cannot love an unknown, ab- 
stract something which is called the Universal will, 
the immortal intelligent power; he must know it in 
some human, concrete shape that he can see or. 
imagine like himself; otherwise it has no power to 
move his feelings, has no comfort for his emotional 
sufferings, his fears and apprehensions. He can- 
not feel in sympathy, cannot love, an impersonal 
power ; he must, for his purposes, and that he may 
fulfil his duties as a particular to the Universal 
will, feel that Universal will to be to him a man 
divine, all-powerful, all-wise. That he may love 
and pay devotion to it, that power must be inter- 
preted to him in human guise ; so alone can he 
escape the awful despair of a particular who sees 
itself a microscopic unit in a Universal whole that 
rolls on regardless of his individual welfare, im- 
personal in its relations to him, relentless in its 
treatment of him, without human feeling or human 
regard. 

He must have symbols, if you choose to call 
them so, of these realities. Without symbols, his 
emotional life, his feelings (which alone move his 
will), go unfed, unsatisfied, and finally die for lack 
of their proper nourishment. It is easy to mis- 
take these symbols for the reality behind them, 
since it is the human instinct to more and more re- 
gard the symbols and disregard their meaning, to 



THE CONCRETE PICTURE 157 

substitute them for what they symbolize. All his- 
tory teaches us this. And so of God himself ; the 
struggle of men to visualize him, give him some 
visible corporeal symbol such as their heart and 
feelings craved, was ever leading them into by- 
paths of error. Moses on Mt. Sinai, communing 
with the Lord in clouds and darkness, and the 
Israelites — hungry for less abstract, more sym- 
bolic, realization of his reality — making the 
golden calf below, is an oft-repeated episode in 
man's religious history. 

It does not follow, of course, that the mere vivi- 
fying of some idea, the mere impressing on the 
mind some definite picture, some symbol, instead of 
an abstraction, such as the nation, marriage, 
justice, God, will of itself coerce the will into any 
particular act. All that the process does is to 
lay the foundation for joining to such vivid idea 
the acting idea, such as the dying for one's coun- 
try, the observance of the marriage vows, the sub- 
mission to the decrees of justice, reverence and 
service to God. What kind and sort of acting idea 
is to be joined to those substantive ideas thus 
vivified by translation into symbols, is another mat- 
ter. This is moral education, that changing of 
character or building up of character which we 
study and which is, especially in its more compli- 
cated, higher development, not easy of explication. 

In all the higher stages of this process there is 
an important intellectual element that does not 
appear in the less sophisticated. It requires no 



158 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

intellectual effort, or at least one of a very simple 
sort, to join with the idea of food the acting idea 
of eating. But when we approach the highly in- 
volved, complicated ideas, we find the intellectual 
process assuming an ever larger and more im- 
portant place. 

The joining of proper acting ideas to substan- 
tive ideas may be said, indeed, to be the chief proc- 
ess of civilization so far as conduct is concerned, 
for the degree of civilization of a nation or of a 
man may be said to consist largely in the number 
and quality of these conjunctions of substantive 
and acting ideas which have been acquired. The 
greater the civilization, the more extensive, elab- 
orate, and finely discriminated is this stock of ideas 
so conjoined. 

The amplifying, refining, and perfecting of these 
ideas and their proper conjoining may be very well 
observed in the growth of the science of the law 
as it develops and perfects itself. The entire in- 
tellectual process exhibits itself in the trial of 
causes in the court as they arise and are decided. 
Such trials are always — as a matter of law apart 
from facts — the trying of this single question : 
was the proper acting idea conjoined with this par- 
ticular definite substantive idea as exhibited by the 
facts? And the decision always involves a passing 
from some uncertain or doubtful conjunction of 
acting idea to a more certain and fixed conjunc- 
tion. 

The progress of a people or of a man in moral 



THE CONCRETE PICTURE 159 

education, in civilization as regards conduct, must 
always be measured by the degree of certainty with 
which its or his acts may be predicted under all 
circumstances. In other words, it is measured by 
the fixity and the number suited for each particular 
case of the conjunctions of his substantive and 
acting ideas. Often the conjunctions of these are 
not fixed, vary with different men or different na- 
tions ; or they may vary with the same man, and 
we pronounce such a man of a vacillating charac- 
ter, signifying thereby that his acts cannot be cal- 
culated or counted upon. 

But always in civilized society true progress is 
ever toward a greater number and a greater cer- 
tainty in these con joinings of acting ideas with sub- 
stantive ideas, — with given concrete circumstances 
requiring action, that is to say. Owing to the new 
circumstances or new substantive ideas constantly 
arising in civilized life, there will always and neces- 
sarily be a large number of uncertain con joinings 
of acting ideas with the new substantive ideas. It 
is the work of great leaders, teachers, reformers, 
to make these con j oinings of proper and right act- 
ing ideas with substantive ideas fixed and certain. 
Wilberforce in his dealing with the slave-trade, 
Sir Robert Peel and the corn laws, John Bright and 
free-trade, are familiar examples of how new acting 
ideas are introduced and of the process of chang- 
ing character in a nation or a community of men. 

New conjunctions of substantive and acting 
ideas are thus made, the stock of these has thus been 



160 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

increased, and civilization has made a step forward. 
Once established, the reasoning, the appeals to 
feeling and to precedent, are lost sight of, and the 
conjunctions thus established become automatic, 
are habits of that society, are its character, its 
will. 

Character, individuality, therefore, consists in 
this stock of what we call habits, fashions of acting, 
but which at the last are seen to be this stock of 
conjunctions of substantive with acting ideas. 
Appetites we all have very much the same, furnish- 
ing us the common substance of our human nature ; 
but these other conjunctions of acting ideas we 
have superimposed on these, and they constitute 
our individual character, our will, in other words, 
or in reality ourself, for our will — thus understood 
as the peculiar and characteristic way in which we 
respond to all our environment, to the Universal 
will — is pre-eminently our essence or entity. 



CONCLUSION 

Let us see now whether we can gather the sepa- 
rate straggling threads of our discussion into any- 
thing substantial and valuable. 

Briefly summarizing, we have seen that the only 
good thing in this world or the next is a good will ; 
that a good will is its own reward, — that is, hap- 
piness is not a result or consequence, but a part of 
a good will. Happiness is simply one aspect, the 



CONCLUSION 161 

emotional side, of the good will. Virtue (the good 
will) and happiness (the result of the good will) 
are simply different views of the one identical con- 
dition of the soul; and that condition of the soul 
is the harmonious tuning of the soul into unison 
with all that touches or affects it, — i. e., with the 
Universe, — for a good will is a will that is har- 
monious with the Universal will manifested to us 
in all the manifold ways in which the Universe 
affects us, from man and his acts, the material 
world and its buffetings, to the remotest stars and 
their appearance. 

Some unfolding of the true notion of will, of 
what it consisted and how its harmony with the 
Universal will was constituted, was then attempted, 
and in this connection it was pointed out that since 
the will thus explicated consisted of innumerable 
separate items, states of consciousness, conjunc- 
tions of substantive and acting ideas, of desires, 
wants, feelings and so on, the harmony and happi- 
ness of each will varied in exact ratio with the pos- 
sibilities of separate harmonies presented by these ; 
that the more there were of these, the greater, more 
intense, would be the happiness because of the 
greater harmony, for harmony was not an abstract 
thing, but a real something whose entirety was 
made up of parts, of individual, separate harmo- 
nies, each item of particular will with each item of 
Universal will. 

It was then pointed out that this desire for har- 
mony of will with the Universal will was as ele- 



162 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

mental as hunger or thirst, and as little capable of 
any further analysis or explanation. It is simply 
the desire for happiness : for no man is happy with 
a conflicting will ; all men find their highest happi- 
ness in harmony of will with will. In this con- 
nection, and illustrating one phase of will har- 
mony, allusion was made to the great passion of 
men for conquest, money, power, discovery, achieve- 
ments, great and small ; the striking of a cricket 
ball, the abolition of the slave trade, the discovery 
of the Pacific Ocean, were all examples in their 
way and place of the satisfaction derived from 
harmony of will with will. The realization of the 
will might fitly describe this special class of har- 
monies where will and act are made one by accom- 
plishment, internal will made harmonious with ex- 
ternal act. 

This, indeed, is the only adequate philosophical 
explanation of the joy gained by achievements that 
bear within themselves no pleasure of the senses to 
reward the doer of them. If we ask why should 
the discoverer, the scientist, the statesman, the 
scholar, struggle for years amid difficulties, dan- 
gers, tiresome details, to accomplish some object 
which they have fixed upon, one may be told for 
glory, honor, fame. But these are mere names ; 
what are they in reality, and how do they give 
satisfaction to the toilers? Surely these are 
nothing more than the approval and recognition by 
others of the worthiness of the work done, the 
agreement of other wills with the wills of the doers. 



CONCLUSION 163 

So whether we consider the satisfaction of the man 
himself in his achievement, or the appreciation of 
others of that achievement, that is sometimes called 
reputation, applause, glory, fame, — it is plain that 
it is in its last analysis nothing more than har- 
mony of will with will. For my pleasure in your 
applause or approval of any deed of mine is due 
solely and only to the agreement of your will with 
mine, the similarity of content between them, your 
will echoing back to me my own in your words of 
approval, of praise; and that is fame, glory, just 
as my own internal satisfaction in the realization 
of my will grows out of a harmony of my internal 
will (the idea to be executed) with the deed exe- 
cuted and accomplished and so echoing back to me 
from the external world of deeds my internal world 
of ideas, making a complete harmony. 

It was then shown how, in this struggle of men 
for harmony of will, two great instrumentalities 
were employed: First, art, which is the great 
bridge of communication for feeling between men. 
It is evident that if harmony of will is to exist be- 
tween man and man, there must be a sharing of feel- 
ings each with the other. No man is happy shut in 
upon his own feelings with no man to whom he 
can communicate; the first impulse of every man 
passessed of feeling is to express it in some external 
way; to cry out that feeling to another; to share 
it ; to gain harmony of will with will by that means, 
and so attain the joy which that harmony yields. 
And so again there is a pleasure, in the reverse 



164 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

order, of receiving the feeling of another so that 
the recipient may have and share the feeling con- 
veyed to him. This is art and art's service to man. 
It unites all in common feelings. But there is in 
man a further desire, occasioned and growing out, 
of his environment, out of the situation in which he 
finds himself. He comes into a world full of 
things — of men, animals, natural objects; he is 
exposed to all sorts of impressions of the senses to 
which he finds it necessary to respond in some way ; 
he finds himself in countless relations with external 
things. He is like a mariner on a vast ocean ; he 
looks for some beacon, some point of land or star, 
that shall show him where he is and whither he is 
going. He must orientate himself with his sur- 
roundings ; this means he must have a vision of 
what his place is, what his purpose and part in the 
chaotic sea of men and things about him. 

Until this finding of himself he can have no satis- 
faction, no rest ; a feeling of uneasiness afflicts him, 
a painful confusion of thought. Like a wanderer 
from another planet, he is separate, alone ; he has 
no connection with his surroundings, and his sur- 
roundings have no relation to him. In other 
words, his will and the Universal will known to him 
in these have no point of union or connection ; the 
world and its affairs roll on regardless, cruelly re- 
gardless, of him and his affairs. The two wills — 
his, the particular, and theirs, the Universal — 
have no harmony. 

It is the part of religion to formulate this rela- 



CONCLUSION 165 

tion between man and the Universe into a harmony. 
According to Ira W. Howarth's definition, religion 
is " the effective desire to be in right relations to the 
power manifesting itself in the Universe." That 
is, religion is the desire and the means by which, in 
various ways according to their several needs and 
capacities, men are brought into reconciliation with 
the Universal will, — i. e., " the power manifesting 
itself in the Universe." This requires a more or 
less elaborate formulization of the purpose and end 
of the Universe, and of the relations not only of 
men, but of all its parts to each other. Out of this 
again springs the duties of man to the Universe 
and all its parts. Morality is and must be 
founded, therefore, in religion, for it is only out of 
the relations of man thus formulated by religion 
that any moral obligation can find its sanction. 
This may be described as the intellectual side of 
religion, the plan and scheme by which man is 
placed in true relations with the Universe. But 
now feelings become involved, there is a satisfaction 
in a harmony of will with Universal will thus 
brought about, and whenever he violates the duties 
growing out of his relations to the Universal will, 
he feels discomfort by reason of the want of har- 
mony which then results between his will and the 
will of the Universe as he understands it, as it is 
set forth by his religion. 

To put the matter more specifically, this primary 
elemental craving of man for harmony of will com- 
pels him to ask : " What is the meaning of all I 



166 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

see about me; what must I do with regard to it; 
what is its purpose with me ? In short, how do we 
stand towards each other? " These questions are 
forced upon every man the moment he turns from 
himself and looks upon his surroundings ; for he 
cannot think with any comfort that he and they are 
merely in a common chaos, that there is no relation 
in which they stand to each other, no common 
higher ground upon which and by which their ap- 
parent disparateness is united. 

It is religion's part to answer all these questions, 
and all religions worthy of the name do so in more 
or less complete fashion; it is for this they exist, 
to orientate the individual with the Universe. 
What part the intellect of each man plays in this 
was hinted at ; for it is a mixed matter of intellect 
which perceives and understands and comprehends 
the purpose of all and of feelings which crave the 
satisfaction that a knowledge of purpose and mean- 
ing bestows, instead of the bewilderment springing 
from a want of such knowledge. Until he formu- 
lates his religion, all the transactions going on 
about him, all the natural objects by which he is 
surrounded, are a species of chaos ; they seem 
separate, independent of each other and of himself. 
This is distressing to him ; it constitutes a will 
within him conflicting or rather not harmonious 
with the will without. He must have some under- 
standing of this turmoil, perceive in it some plan 
or purpose and fit himself into that plan, before 
his will and the external Universal will can har- 



CONCLUSION 167 

monize. He cannot think but that there is such a 
plan or scheme which should reconcile him and all 
the rest with the harmonious whole. Such a recon- 
ciliation he craves as an essential to a harmonious 
will, — i. e., happiness in his own inner state. 

Once let a man conceive in some shape what the 
purpose of it all is ; let there form itself the picture 
of that great processional of men and things, 
events, happenings, and the whither and why of 
its stately impersonal march; and there follows 
not only a feeling of satisfaction that he knows his 
place, but also a feeling that he must keep that 
place, follow that march, be part of that proces- 
sional. Any failure to do so causes unhappiness 
because it makes his will inharmonious. 

The question of the education of the will and the 
importance of symbols, of example, was dwelt on, 
and again in this connection the nature of the will 
was discussed and it was shown that the freedom of 
the will had been unnecessarily doubted from a 
lack of a proper understanding of what the par- 
ticular will was as a part of the whole ; that my will 
was not less mine because it was a creature of the 
past as well as of the present. I am part of that 
past just as the past is part of me, not mechani- 
cally, but vitally connected, not separate and dif- 
ferent from me, but permeating me, living in me, 
and finding its own fruition in me as its continua- 
tion. 

From all this, therefore, may we not get a some- 
thing valuable and worth our searching out in this 



168 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

single truth which is the very soul of the whole mat- 
ter, the legitimate gathering together of all the 
apparently scattered, disconnected threads of dis- 
cussion, — namely, that the self for its own sake, 
to preserve itself and its individuality, must be part 
of the whole? Separate from the whole, by itself, 
it is not significant, is not really itself. It is the 
lonely cipher without its digits and so devoid of 
meaning. To realize its selfness it must realize 
itself as a part of the whole. Particular and Uni- 
versal are not separate and distinct, but identical, 
different aspects of the one individual whole, the 
Universal made manifest and known to us by the 
particulars gathered together and united to form a 
single purpose, a common end of all. In their 
union they become much more than the mere adding 
together of particulars, for the particular wills 
thus united are like the bits of some fine mosaic ; 
by themselves, tiny and without meaning, but when 
united, showing forth with shining truth the pic- 
ture of the Master in all its fullness and splendor 
of significance. The picture was there all the time, 
a part of it in each particular bit of apparently 
insignificant stone, but only to be revealed when, 
all united, these, each in its place, put their other- 
wise unmeaning particularity into the great, com- 
plete whole. They, in their isolation and separate- 
ness, were the Universal divided and perceived in 
detail, — to our intellect a mystery, for, notwith- 
standing our metaphors, it is not easy to think 



CONCLUSION 169 

how the particular can be part of the Universal 
and yet still remain itself; still harder is it to 
understand how that particularity is more truly 
realized, intensified, by the losing of the particular 
in the whole, that it is there, not lost, but empha- 
sized and given its true particularity. 

There are, however, partial, imperfect illustra- 
tions of this truth to be found in all the various 
phenomena of our life. In the laws and the growth 
of society we see how throughout all social rela- 
tions of men together there has arisen in each com- 
munity of men a common will what might be called 
pro hac vice, a Universal will superior to and com- 
pelling all particular wills, yet a growth of them, a 
product of the particular wills working and modi- 
fying each the other, not, as Rousseau well pointed 
out, a mere adding together of particular wills, a 
Volunte de tons, but a Volunte Generate, a Univer- 
sal will, that rises above all particular wills and yet 
at the same time realizes them in a way that by 
themselves, each for itself, they never could do. 
The individual will, by losing itself in the Univer- 
sal and only by so losing itself, finds itself a higher 
and greater individual will. It is a loss which is 
no real loss, but a gain. It is vividly portrayed by 
the inspiring words of Scripture : " He that 
loseth his life for my sake shall find it." 

This realizing of the individual will in the Uni- 
versal, by which it touches a higher plane and, by 
going out of its particularity, attains an intenser 



170 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

and truer particularity, may be seen in many and 
very various domains of will activity. 

Lord Haldane, in a recent address * on law as 
applied to society, remarked that in society, apart 
and beside the express statute law, the various in- 
dividuals composing it have established a common 
will — part of that Universal will, I should call 
it — " and in so willing are more than isolated men 
and women. It is not, indeed, as unrelated atoms 
that they have lived. . . . They cannot mark off 
or define their own individualities without reference 
to the individualities of others. . . . They are real 
only because they are social." 

And so we find the patriotism, the zeal of a vast 
crowd or of a nation, wherein the individual unit, 
rising above itself into the Universal will, suffers 
an apotheosis in a Leonidas, a Tell, a Luther. 
Were it not so, these never would have had the 
power to accomplish the deeds they did, for it was 
because they represented, even anticipated, in ex- 
pression the latent will of all that they became the 
representatives and leaders of the individuals who 
beheld in them the intensified realization of their 
individual wills. 

In a lesser and different degree, yet in a specially 
marked way, we may recognize this process of 
realizing the individual will by participating in the 
Universal will in the domain of our feelings. Thus 
a man caught up into the vortex of enthusiasm of 

* Address delivered before American Bar Association at 
Montreal, 1913. 



CONCLUSION 171 

a great assemblage, for example, finds himself filled 
with an ardor and intensity of emotion of which by 
himself and isolated he is incapable. He is carried 
away, out of, beyond, and above himself. Our feel- 
ings touch reality as nothing else does, and so 
make us to know the truth and the joy of this los- 
ing of the particular in the Universal. 

Simple examples of this are common enough for 
us not to recognize them as either strange or very 
peculiar, and so we fail to mark their underlying 
meaning. It is no uncommon experience of us all, 
I take it, to have felt the passion of enthusiasm, the 
intensity of feeling that has filled our souls on some 
great occasion when, in common with a vast multi- 
tude of our fellows we have shared some great 
emotion with them, — I care not whether it be of 
joy or sorrow ; whether it be the triumph of the vic- 
tory at Yorktown or the sorrow of Lincoln's death. 
Our petty self had lost nothing of its selfness 
when it thus lost itself with a vast multitude of 
others ; its selfness was intensified a thousand 
times by its complete absorption in the common 
exultation or the common woe. It is the touch of 
the Universal ; wherever it appears there comes with 
it that tremendous and overwhelming feeling which 
tells us of the mighty whole of which we are part. 
Our souls respond as to a master key that unlocks 
latent treasures of feelings until then unknown. 

Who is there that has not felt that tingling of 
the nerves at the announcement : " The President 
of the United States ! " " The Emperor ! " " The 



172 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

King ! " It is not a feeling of personal subservi- 
ence, of abject submission, that the pronouncing 
of these words inspires, but the consciousness, 
brought home in this vivid, visible image, of the 
state, the nation, and of the dignity and the worth 
that come to the individual when it is thus related 
to this partial Universal by this realized sense of 
the particular's place and rights in the whole, 
its ownership of the whole. Here we have a dim 
foreshadowing of the great truth and the possi- 
bility of the reconciliation of the particular with 
the Universal. 

On this high plane there comes into view, like 
the snow peak of some shadowy Alpine summit, 
another and final truth, a truth of conduct. We 
now understand what the supreme law of all moral 
conduct, the law of sacrifice of self, signifies. In 
the clear light of our present position it appears 
not really a sacrifice of self at all; it is rather a 
truer realization, an intensification, of the self in 
the Universal to which it gives itself up. For thus 
the self, in yielding all to the Universal, receives 
back a far richer content than it gave up, just as 
I, with my feeble enthusiasm of patriotism or of 
grief, coming to the great multitude, get back as 
one of them a thousandfold more intense feeling 
than I brought with me. Self-sacrifice so under- 
stood is not a blotting out of self — a striking 
down of the self's feelings and will — but a filling 
the self with the Universal feelings and will. Only 



CONCLUSION 173 

am I truly myself when I become part of the whole 
and forget myself in it. 

But all these are abstractions hard of compre- 
hension; let us vivify our thinking with the con- 
templation of an example of how this great law of 
self-sacrifice has worked itself out in a concrete 
instance, the greatest instance known to history, 
for our reality is ever to be found in the concrete, 
the specific. 

We have already seen that all character making 
must be by what we may call symbols, something 
that appeals to the feelings and so influences the 
will. Symbols are concrete, individual ; make their 
appeal not through the intellect, but to the emo- 
tions. They must be understood as including 
everything that addresses the feelings with the 
intent of rousing them and so teaching them. Of 
all symbols the most powerful is that of personal 
example ; act as you would teach your child or your 
pupil to act. And with the appearance of Jesus 
Christ on earth there came the teaching of self- 
sacrifice by personal example. The great lesson 
of the losing of one's self to gain a richer, grander 
self was taught, as best it could be, by the most 
amazing example, the crucifixion of an innocent 
man for the guilt of others ; so that from that day 
the cross has been the mighty symbol of the law of 
self-sacrifice. 

It has been the symbol of the reconciliation of 
the particular will with the Universal. In the ter- 



174 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

rible light of that sacrifice the conflict and war 
and self-assertion of the particular against the 
Universal was forever condemned and set aside. It 
is in this light that we are to read the wonderful 
words that revolutionized ethical ideals. " Ye 
have heard that it hath been said, an eye for an 
eye and a tooth for a tooth : but / say unto you " 
(mark the splendor of assured authority that spoke 
in that " I," setting at nought with a single stroke 
the teachings of the thousands of years of the past) 
" / say unto you that ye resist not evil ; but who- 
soever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to 
him the other also." And again, " You have heard 
that it hath been said : Thou shalt love thy neigh- 
bor as thyself and hate thine enemy. But I say 
unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse 
you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for 
them that despitefully use you and persecute 
you." * 

Here in this law of self-sacrifice we have the solu- 
tion of the great practical problem of our earthly 
life, the reconciliation of the particular with the 
Universal will, the rule of all action, of conduct. 
Properly understood, this does not blot out the 
particular; it is rather its highest realization. 
And it furnishes the intellect with the solution of 
its problem, the relation of the particular to the 
Universal. 

* St. Matthew's Gospel, V: 38 et seq. 



RECONCILIATION OF THE WILL 175 



RECONCILIATION OF THE PARTICULAR 
AND THE UNIVERSAL WILL 

Some of the attempts at this reconciliation have 
brought about merely negative results, have re- 
duced the particular will to nothing and called that 
harmony with the Universal. Buddhistic teaching 
of Nirvana eliminates every element of individual 
will — its desires, ideas, cravings — and presents 
an empty emasculated shell as the reconciled par- 
ticular will. Suppress your particular desires, 
destroy your natural appetites and passions, make 
the particular will a blank in these elements of its 
particularity ; and again, blot out in like manner 
your hatred as your love, hate not your enemy any 
more than you love your friend. Observe how dif- 
ferent is the Christian reconciliation of the par- 
ticular will with the Universal. It does truly sup- 
press the hatred of one's enemy, and so far it is as 
negative as Buddhism itself; but it does not stop 
with negation, — it supplies positive content for 
what it takes away. " Love your enemies, bless 
them that curse you." It leaves the Universalized 
will not a mere negative, a blank ; it gives it posi- 
tive content. On the other hand, it must be re- 
membered that too great a content, too excessive 
a particularity, is in effect as evil as too little. 
The voluptuary who gives free rein to his particu- 
larity and the ascetic who gives none are both 
out of proper relations with the Universal, and the 



176 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

results, curiously enough, are much the same in 
both cases. One destroys the individuality of the 
particular by excessive expression ; the other by ex- 
cessive suppression. For particularity, carried too 
far by the unregulated indulgence of every item 
of its content, every appetite and passion going its 
full length without let or hindrance, at last turns 
that particularity into a blank and destroys it. 
The body, the instrument of its expression, is rent 
asunder by unbridled appetites until it is incapable 
of further expression of particularity ; and how 
much more the soul, the source and seat of all the 
particularity of the individual, that delicate, sensi- 
tive intangible reality that lies behind all the phys- 
ical realities ! It suffers by this excess a far worse 
fate, for its true particularity, which consists of 
and depends upon proper relations to the Universal 
of which it is part, is blotted out and annihilated 
by this disregard of the Universal, of the whole. 
A denial of its relation to the whole by the particu- 
lar, which this excess of particularity amounts to, 
is a denial of itself. " The soul that sinneth, it 
shall die," is not a threat, but a statement of an in- 
evitable result, for the particular can only be it- 
self, realize its particularity, when in relation with 
and in subordination to the whole, reconciled and 
harmonious with the Universal. 

Of what the true reconciliation of the particular 
will with the Universal will must consist, we may 
get a definite notion by beginning, not at the top, 
but at the bottom of the process. The natural, 



RECONCILIATION OF THE WILL 177 

instinctive reaching out of every man for a share 
in Universal common feelings of the family, the 
race, the nation, point us on our way, for the long- 
ing of men for the theater, the novel, the poem, 
for music, painting, all art, grows out of this de- 
sire to reconcile their particular with that partial 
Universal. They thus in art, in all its manifold 
representations, Universalize their individual feel- 
ings, their particular affections, by entering into 
the feelings and affections common to all men. 
This is the first step. Here we have not a blank, 
empty particularity as our result, but a richer, 
fuller, particularity, a raising of the particular to 
greater intensity, richer content, by the taking in 
and sharing of these feelings of others. 

This is, however, but a short and feeble step in 
our path to the full reconciliation which we seek. 
So far we have preserved the particular will and 
enriched it with the content of other wills, and so 
approached the Universal will. We are still, how- 
ever, very far short of our final goal; the road is 
long and difficult, full of pitfalls, false leads, and 
snares. It is by gradual stages only that this last 
and highest stage of perfect reconciliation with the 
Universal will is to be reached by the particular. 
First the particular will has to begin by making 
the feelings, the hopes, fears, desires, of others its 
own by entering into them and sharing them: this 
it does on the lowest plane by the enjoyment of 
works of art in all their variety ; this gives rise to 
sympathy of feeling with others, and thus follows 



178 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

a very natural wish to help and satisfy those de- 
sires of others by active work for them. The par- 
ticular, the individual, will manifests itself in be- 
nevolent and charitable work ; this entails a greater 
or less amount of sacrifice of individual, particular 
desire and wants to the desires and wants of oth- 
ers ; so step by step the particular becomes more 
and more filled with the desires, wishes, wants of 
others, which, becoming its own in this way, are 
substituted for its particularity, — or perhaps we 
should say, become a part of that particularity ; 
and at the final stage of all, when the particular 
will has at last of its own accord acquired for its 
own particular content the Universal will, we reach 
the ultimate, the highest stage of all, the perfect 
union of particular and Universal which is per- 
haps but a possibility to us, but which is exempli- 
fied by that last, agonizing yet joyful cry of the 
particular will as it yields itself to the Universal: 
" Abba, Father : all is possible unto thee ; take 
away this cup from me. Nevertheless, not what 
I will, but what thou wilt." * 

For so must we interpret that cry. It is agon- 
izing — else where the sacrifice? It is joyful, full 
of the happiness of perfect unity with the Univer- 
sal will — else where that free submission of will 
essential to the act? Here lies the mystery of the 
reconciliation of the will: it is at once a giving 
up of all individual desire as witnessed in the re- 
quest that prefaces it, " Take away this cup," 

* St. Mark's Gospel, XIV: 36. 



RECONCILIATION OF THE WILL 179 

and a receiving back of more than was given up, 
" What thou wilt." On this side of its manifold 
character it is summed up in that magnificent dec- 
laration of Hebrew inspiration so mysterious to 
our understanding : " He that findeth his life 
shall lose it, and he that loseth his life for my sake 
shall find it." * 

Well may we meditate this, the great and final 
truth of the particular and Universal will. It is 
the law of willing sacrifice of the particular to the 
Universal that we have arrived at. Its elements 
are easily discerned ; it is a sacrifice, — that is, it 
must cost the particular will an effort ; it must 
be willing, — that is, the particular will must of 
itself, without external coercion, make the Uni- 
versal will part of itself; it must be for the sake 
of, because of, the Universal, — that is, it is not 
a mere negation, a sacrifice for nothing: it must 
be for " my sake," for the Universal, — that is, the 
emptiness of what is lost is filled with the fullness 
of what is gained, the Universal will, for whose 
sake it was lost. In mere loss lies no virtue ; the 
suppressing of the particular, of passion, appetite, 
life, is of itself a vain thing if nothing is given 
in its stead. Loss " for my sake " does not take 
away alone ; it gives something back in place of 
what is taken. There lies the very essence and 
soul of the transaction. It is the loss of a small 
thing, of the particular life and will, for the 
greater, the Universal life and will, that makes the 
* St. Matthew's Gospel, X: 39. 



180 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

truth of the mysterious saying. To truly under- 
stand we must obey it; in no other way will the 
deep truth of it become ours. Its joy and its 
agony are for the initiated, — that is, the obedi- 
ent, — alone. 

It is evident now that for the particular will to 
yield itself to the Universal is not to blot it out, 
extinguish it in Nirvana, but to give it its highest 
particularity. This sacrifice constitutes its high- 
est particularity. Properly understood, this say- 
ing means the identity of the particular with the 
Universal will; it requires that the particular 
should take to itself all the content of the Uni- 
versal, for so it must do when of its own accord 
it sacrifices itself for its sake. The particular 
adopts for itself the Universal will, and its par- 
ticularity now consists, not of these individual, 
separating traits that formerly were the content 
of its will, but consists of the Universal purposes, 
designs, that it has, by its sacrifice of itself, made 
its own. Thus is to be understood that humanly 
contradictory saying, " Whosoever loseth his life 
shall save it " : he loses it in its individual particu- 
larity ; he gains it in its universality, its identifica- 
tion with the Universal will. But it is a willing 
sacrifice ; it is a voluntary identification of the par- 
ticular with the Universal. In this lies the very 
essence of the reconciliation. 

Or again and finally, we have arrived at the last 
law of the two wills, the law of sacrifice. This 
law we may trace back in smaller matters color- 



RECONCILIATION OF THE WILL 181 

ing all the conduct of life. It is the law that de- 
clares that the truest particularity of the individ- 
ual is only realized when that particular is 
subordinated to the Universal. All particulars 
are only able to truly realize their particularity 
as part of the Universal, and so we behold from the 
highest to the lowest the law of sacrifice to be the 
true law of all the relations of life, of every par- 
ticular to other particulars and to the whole. 
This is the solution of the problem of all our life 
together; all the relations of life are governed by 
this supreme law, — master and servant, mother 
and child, husband and wife. 

The law which deals more particularly than any 
other science with these problems of the relations 
of the particular and the Universal affords many 
interesting views of them in the course of its dis- 
cussions of how and to what extent the particular, 
the individual, is to yield up part of its individual- 
ity to the state, representing society as the whole 
as over against the part. In his " Law as a 
Means to an End," Von Ihering, the well known 
philosophical German jurist, remarks on this 
point : " It is the right as well as the duty of 
society to set its own interests against those of 
individual egoism. . . . The individual exists not 
only for himself, but also for the world ; therefore, 
freedom, that which is expedient for the individual, 
must be subordinated to justice, which is for the 
advantage of all." 

It is only as each particular serves some other, 



182 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

and through that other the Universal, that its re- 
lation is a true one. Even in the most sordid 
relations of business life, where the object of each 
particular apparently is to get simply for itself, a 
slight examination will reveal the truth that no 
man is ever rewarded on this lowest plane except 
in so far as he has been useful, has performed 
some service to another. His worth and value as 
a particular — be it servant, parent, citizen, what 
you will of the various relations of life — is meas- 
ured not by what he does for himself, but by what 
he does for others ; and we have again a different 
vision of the law of sacrifice, for we see that the 
worth of the particularity of any will is measured 
by the extent to which it is Universalized by be- 
coming of worth to the whole. To put it very 
grossly and in the lowest terms, we do not pay a 
man for his labor except so far as that labor is 
useful, serves not himself but others. 

So the magnificent saying of Hebrew inspiration 
that has echoed down the ages, unapproachable in 
its sublimity and daring, sheds a light never before 
known on the relation of the particular to the Uni- 
versal will, not only in its fundamental and final, 
but in its minute and, so to speak, less important 
relations of everyday life. 

The whole practical wisdom of life might be 
summed up, not only for the next world but for 
this world, in that pregnant declaration : " Whoso 
loseth his life for my sake shall find it." The law 
of sacrifice is the universal law. 



RECONCILIATION OF THE WILL 183 

One word remains yet to be said on the internal 
side of this great law of willing sacrifice. Here 
stands revealed in a new light the identity of virtue 
and its reward as well as the identity of vice and 
its punishment. Heaven and hell are names for 
the harmonious and the conflicting will. If the 
reality of heaven be the harmony of will with will, 
so of hell we may say its reality is nothing more 
than the content of a will that goes on forever 
contradicting the Universal will; thus may we un- 
derstand that terrible metaphor of the Scriptures : 
" Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not 
quenched." Could there be a more vivid picture 
of the vain, yet unceasing, striving of an evil will 
for its own ends and purposes against the ends 
and purposes of the Universal will. Baffled, 
turned back upon itself by the Universal, it ever 
strives and conflicts without end, without success, 
hopeless. It is the drunkard ever seeking to sat- 
isfy a thirst that is forbidden satisfaction ; the 
perpetual craving of desires and appetites to which 
the Universal will forbids all satisfaction. It is 
a state of conflicting wills that makes hell. All 
men are now speaking of the horrors of Belgium, 
of desolate homes, famishing children, beautiful 
cities turned to ashes, of the dead lying uncared 
for in its fields, of the starving and the mutilated 
that are the only living creatures left. But these 
are but the faint external expressions of the inter- 
nal conflicting wills that have brought them about. 

And the final happiness of the particular con- 



184 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

sists in this — the harmony, the unity of feeling, 
which now results with that Universal to whom it 
has offered itself a willing sacrifice. What a 
splendid and noble picture of the final happiness 
is here afforded ! It is the apotheosis of what has 
been called in earthly phrase the communion of 
soul with soul. It is the interchange of feeling 
and soul of the particular with the feeling and 
soul of the Universal. We cannot quite under- 
stand this stated in abstract terms, and we pre- 
figure it to ourselves in the only way by which it 
is possible to even imagine it, under the guise 
of human friendship. We think of the spiritual 
communion with the man Jesus Christ for ever and 
ever as the nearest possible imaging of it. Of 
this we cannot speak in intelligible terms under 
the restricted conditions of earthly life and feeling. 
Here we have the definition of heaven, the spir- 
itual communion of the individual who has, by the 
sacrifice of his particular will, come into perfect 
accord with the Universal will. What the inten- 
sity of this joy must be, what a reward of virtue, 
we can only faintly picture to ourselves, but of 
one thing we may be reasonably sure — that in this 
way, and in this way alone, may we grasp some 
notion of heaven and its joys. We have left be- 
hind us those vague imaginings about it, those 
stupid attempts to picture it as something utterly 
different from all that gives us pleasure here, on 
the one hand, as if the difference from everything 
we had ever known before were the main point; 



RECONCILIATION OF THE WILL 185 

and, on the other hand, we have put aside that 
Mahomet's paradise built up by simply translating 
the grossly material pleasures of our earthly en- 
vironment to an utterly unknown realm. 

To an earthly imagination filled with all this 
material furniture of sensual enjoyment, heaven 
— deprived of them and reduced to the mere sit- 
ting still like an Indian Brahmin losing oneself 
in contemplation — must seem a dull place, hope- 
lessly stupid and uninteresting. There seems no 
active employment, no progress, no life. But the 
truth properly understood presents no such pic- 
ture ; it sets forth a far different story. We now 
behold ourselves in the stream of a deep and active 
spiritual life and growth in which the struggle of 
the particular is to gather in more and more of 
the Universal will and the gaining of an ever deeper 
and richer harmony of its own will with the Uni- 
versal. 

Here we have a notion of heaven that will bear 
the strictest philosophical scrutiny. For if we 
set ourselves to examine the various causes and 
sources of pleasure here and now, and recall which 
of them all might be reasonably expected to survive 
that great change of death, we must concede that 
all pleasure of the senses must perish with them. 
The seeing eye, the hearing ear, the tasting tongue, 
perish, and from these no pleasures of heaven can 
be drawn. And yet if we believe, as of necessity 
we must, that our own identity is unaltered, it must 
follow that the roots and sources of the pleasures 



186 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

of our heaven must be such as to some extent at 
least are contained in our present identity. 

We therefore require a pleasure independent of 
our bodily senses, which presumably perish with 
our bodies, and yet a pleasure for which we have 
a capacity in some degree now if we are to pre- 
serve in heaven our present identity of character 
and of soul. And again it must be a pleasure 
that depends on no external means, no material 
things, for producing it; we must bear its germs 
within our own spiritual nature ; it must be some- 
thing which we can carry with us from this world 
into the next. 

Let us see, then, if we can discover some such 
pleasure which will even partially answer these re- 
quirements. I think there is only one to which we 
would be willing to attribute these characteristics ; 
not that we know it in all its fullness, but that we 
have glimpses of it — short, imperfect experiences, 
a dim shadow of its immortal reality. We have 
various names for it — friendship, sympathy, love, 
fellowship of man with man ; communion with God 
is the highest phase known to us. But to describe 
it in the most general terms, it is that harmony 
of will with will which we only know in these par- 
ticular phases of it when we share with others some 
common feeling of sorrow, joy, indignation, any 
one of the thousand shades of emotion which from 
time to time fill our consciousness. It is not the 
kind of feeling, but the fact of its being held in 
common with others, the community of the feeling, 



RECONCILIATION OF THE WILL 187 

that makes it pleasurable, so that even sorrow and 
suffering experienced with others has its own pe- 
culiar pleasure. 

Here we have the highest and most intense pleas- 
ure we are capable of, without exception. It de- 
pends on no material objects, is influenced by no 
external environment ; even the particular feeling 
makes little matter provided it is a feeling capable 
of being held in common. This proviso is, how- 
ever, significant ; it excludes the feeling of ill will, 
hatred, envy, malice, and the like as not properly 
community feelings, as separative, dividing feel- 
ings. 

This, then, gives us the real joys of heaven, the 
harmony of will with will and with the Universal 
will that is the perfect communing of all souls to- 
gether in common feelings ; which is, in short, the 
final reward of virtue, that communion of saints of 
which so much has been said. 

This is no faint, uncertain destiny or state, this 
unity of particular will with Universal will, but 
something surpassing all we can understand or im- 
agine. Nor will it be the same for all, a sort of 
general impersonal state of harmony ; but it will 
be for each his own individual, particular harmony, 
his note harmonizing with all other notes of that 
great will orchestra, yet still preserving his par- 
ticularity. That is, every feeling of mind, every 
thought and generous emotion, will find there its 
echo, its accompanying chorus ; and these will be 
just so numerous and rich a chorus as I have made 



188 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

numerous and rich the content of my will by gar- 
nering noble ideas, generous feelings, pure and ele- 
vating emotions. So that we may imagine every 
good deed on earth, every charitable thought, 
going to swell the richness of the harmony that 
my will is to have hereafter with that Universal 
will. This is to be the heaven of our dreams, but 
yet the heaven of our own creating; for it will be 
the content of our will harmonizing with the con- 
tent of the Universal will that makes that heaven. 
Each man will have his own heaven, will receive to 
himself just so much of the Universal will as he 
can contain, and no more. His heaven will be an 
echo of himself. We build our own heaven with 
our acts: 

" Our acts our angels are, or good or ill; 
Our fatal shadows that go with us still." 

Every kind word to another, every act of self- 
sacrifice, every gift of time, goods — above all, of 
yourself — to the suffering, the sick, the needy, 
are stones in the structure of that heavenly house 
of your abiding that will some day be yours. 

Our heaven must begin here if we expect to en- 
joy one hereafter; with our own hands must we 
fashion it. We leave philosophy as such behind us 
as we approach the tremendous reality of this world 
as well as of the next, and enter this high but less 
sure region of mystery and imagination. Per- 
haps we may go a step beyond, get visions outside 
our prison house of flesh, those stone walls of mat- 



RECONCILIATION OF THE WILL 189 

ter, of the external world, apparently so real, yet 
in the light of this upward vision so slight, so 
little accounting. Now we catch a glimpse of the 
meaning of those inspiring words of St. Paul, 
" When this mortal shall put on immortality " ; 
for this refers to no mechanical outward change, 
but to that great spiritual change in the soul by 
which, beginning in this life, we put away selfish 
thoughts and put in their place the thought of 
others, lose the individual and the particular in the 
Universal and the eternal. " The eternal thoughts 
of creatures brief " replace our earthly thoughts, 
and so we truly exchange our mortality for im- 
mortality. And thus it is that this mortal puts on 
immortality by no miracle, no sudden transition 
from one to the other, but by the slow and often 
painful passage of our souls from selfish thoughts 
to generous and sympathetic thoughts, from the 
particular will to the Universal will. 

And here again are infinite possibilities, heaven 
opening above heaven. As we gather richness and 
power into the particular will that it may thus 
more completely mirror the Universal will, we shall 
attain to ever greater and deeper harmony of will. \J 

This we cannot think save in symbols, pictures of 
the soul faintly hinting the tremendous reality. 

The Universal will in its abstract, unimagined 

truth we cannot think; but under the image given . 

to us, the man Christ Jesus/the incarnation for / . 

our human needs of that will, we may somehow 
grasp the otherwise unthinkable reality of all this. 



190 THE WILL IN ETHICS 

We can imagine the perpetual and eternal com- 
munity of feeling with him as shadowing forth in 
anthropomorphic terms the great Universal will 
that governs and directs all, embraces and is all 
particular wills, for which our own will has yielded 
itself a willing sacrifice and, so yielding, has come 
into perfect harmony, boundless wealth of feeling; 
for it is that final realization of the particular will 
in the Universal which makes them one and indis- 
tinguishable. 



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